


Peregrinitos

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1980s, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Dance, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Banter, Coffee, Coffee Shops, Dancing, Español | Spanish, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Implied Sexual Content, Kissing in the Rain, M/M, Marauders' Era, Masturbation, Pining, Poetry, Remus has an accent, Slow Burn, Smoking, Spain, Suggestive Themes, Theatre, They all speak Spanish, because he absolutely would even though his vocabulary is great, but it's written in English don't worry, flamenco, the slow burn coffee shop AU that will heal your heart I promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-05-10 01:10:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 43,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14727110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Madrid, Spain — 1983. Two dancers from across the proverbial and literal earth join the same company. Amid the swirling atmosphere of new beginnings and old confusion, Sirius and Remus must figure out how to keep dancing and stomp out the embers of internal infernos while holding fast to the rhythm of each passing day. ((playlist link included in author's notes))





	1. Rasgueo

**Author's Note:**

> Playlist for "Peregrinitos" is available at https://open.spotify.com/user/spontaneousness/playlist/2JCt7AGsU1Os7kBW8mp9a1?si=gEZychUnQLSjZeJ462z_mQ
> 
> I'm very excited to start this series!! The happy feeling of it will draw a lot from my time spent rehearsing and performing with my flamenco company, and I'm eager to put my favorite pair of idiots right in the middle of it :> As music is very important to the dance, it will also be important to this fic. I encourage you to listen to the playlist above if you're able, it will help you imagine a lot of the feelings and sounds of the dance if you're not already familiar with it. I hope you're looking forward to reading as it arrives--my schedule IRL isn't super conducive to a rigid update schedule, but know that this is happening! <3

_"Zapatero, a tus zapatos."_

__—__ Spanish proverb _  
_

_—_

_...Le ha preguntado el Papa  
_ _que si han pecado  
_ _El le dice que un beso, mamita,  
_ _que le había dado, niña bonita,  
_ _que le había dado, niña._

_Y la peregrinita,  
_ _que es vergonzosa,  
_ _se le ha puesto la cara, mamita,  
_ _como una rosa, niña bonita,  
_ _como una rosa, niña._

_Y ha respondido el Papa  
_ _desde su cuarto:  
_ _¡Quién fuera pelegrino, mamita,  
_ _para otro tanto! niña bonita,  
_ _para otro tanto! niña._

_Las campanas de Roma  
_ _ya repicaron  
_ _porque los pelegrinos, mamita,  
_ _ya se casaron, niña bonita,  
_ _ya se casaron, niña._

— "Los Pelegrinitos," Spanish folk song

—

_12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11._

“Vamo’ ya, guapo!”

_12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11._

The count of the compás cycles through Sirius’ head like thundering hooves, rattling his pounding pulse as his heels hammer the floor. 

_12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,_

_12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11._

James’ expert strumming on the guitar behind him doubles, compounding the tempo into a fevered unfolding, as Sirius comes out of a half-turn and slams immediately into a series of triple beats that makes his thighs burn with such a burst of effort amid the final fumes of his stamina. 

_“Alé!”_

Sirius can feel his hands sweating under the glare of the high-noon sun where he grips the hem of his jacket with his right hand as he extends the other, open in this final presentation of his building footwork. Every inch of him feels like it’s sweating, not only his palms. Outdoor performances always surprise him with sweat glands in places he had never thought _could_ sweat.

_12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,_

_12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11!_

The stage rattles ominously under Sirius’ feet as he pushes the tempo ever faster, another symptom of performing in squares instead of theatres or cafés when the city leaps at the chance to draw crowds in any and all corners of their edifice— _Fucking makeshift garbage,_ he thinks mildly to himself through a whip-quick series of dizzying quebrada turns. The crowd clustered at the front of the postage-stamp stage swells with encouragement, clapping sharply along with the compás that rises to meet Sirius’ shoes in their rhythmic red blur against the boards.

12, _1, 2,_ 3, _4, 5,_ 6, _7,_ 8, _9,_ 10, _11!_

Sirius closes his buildup with a tight series of stomps and serves his llamada with slicing accuracy—his ponytail, carrying flecks of perspiration wicked from his neck, misses his eye by inches as it snaps around like a black viper. _Fucking weather._

The last phrase erupts from his feet in tight counter-tempo, and applause bursts in a chain through the square. As sweaty as Sirius feels, as exhausted as the bulerías has made him, he can’t help but grin as he pants for air in his final pose. He holds the position for a few more seconds, absorbing the praise like the water he’s fairly desperate for at this point, before dropping into a grateful and fairly boneless bow. _Fucking summer._

August in Madrid is, by Sirius’ personal estimation, probably as close to hell’s climate as one could get if one deigned to imagine Satan with a Mediterranean inclination.

Sirius rights himself and steps back with an arm extended to indicate James, who hoists his well-worn guitar by the neck and takes his own bow beside the half-broken chair on which he had propped his foot to play. The duo take a few more bows together before the crowd finishes applauding and breaks apart with the hum of summertime intent, ready to discover more of the city or continue on about their routine as if Sirius hadn’t just dragged himself halfway to death and back with a, if he’s being honest with himself, utterly fantastic performance. 

Sirius Black has always found it strange to grapple with the ephemeral nature of dancing; his body needs it, craves it, even on the days he can hardly drag himself into the studio to practice. It’s the only constant he’s ever kept.

“Well done, brujo,” James says, clapping Sirius on the shoulder with the hand not wrapped around his guitar. He immediately recoils at the seep of sweat through the fabric and wipes his palm off on Sirius’ forearm, only to make a disgusted noise when he feels more fusty dampness there. 

“Cheers, reyna, you as well,” Sirius replies with a smirk. He bundles James into a headlock and digs his knuckles harmlessly into the other man’s equally sweaty tangle of hair, only releasing him when James slaps him twice on the shoulder to demand freedom as he’s always done since they were boys. 

“You smell awful, wash that fucking costume,” James chokes out with a dramatic show of gagging. 

“Luckier if I don’t,” Sirius sallies back as he shucks off the embroidered white jacket. He winces mutely at the feeling of the fabric peeling away from his limbs like a second, sodden skin.

“You have admirers, suertoso,” James says, waving beatifically at a trio of tourist-y looking women by the edge of their makeshift stage. He leaves Sirius alone to flounder with the weight of attention, suddenly taking great interest in folding his chair up and re-casing his guitar with painful meticulousness. Sirius holds in the urge to kick the man over on the flagstones and smiles his most rehearsed smile at the waiting women, draping his damp jacket over his forearm with as much suavity as the smoldering sun will allow him at this point.

“Good afternoon, how lovely!” one of them pipes up in poorly-pronounced Spanish. Sirius catches the emblem of an American flag on one of their bags and bows his head again with accepting thanks.

“Thank you for watching, how lovely indeed,” he replies in English. Two of the women just barely hold in an outburst of cooing over his accented speech, an incongruous point of self-consciousness of Sirius’ but one he’s able to swallow every now and then, and Sirius has just enough energy left after his dance to not roll his eyes.

“You’re _very_ talented,” the one nearest to Sirius says with a thick tone of brittle innuendo, and he wonders vaguely how much cheap sangria these women have managed to find all afternoon. “Do all the men in Spain know to dance as well as you?”

She reaches out to brush Sirius’ arm, and he bristles at the brashness. _Fucking rude._ He hates generalizations about men who dance almost as much as he hates half-drunk tourists thinking they have the right to touch him after watching him dance.

“Only the ones who also kiss men,” he deadpans. All three women slide into various states of offended or humored by his boorishness, but he doesn’t linger to see the outcome. He turns back to the small dip behind their stage, where James is counting a small bundle of busk tips from the inside of his hat and Sirius plops down on the ground to switch out his boots with his street shoes.

“Did you get some new girlfriends?” James hums knowingly, fanning out the small-change bills and dividing them in an eyeballed “half” that he splits unevenly between himself and Sirius with a wink. Sirius snatches the thinner fold of bills and scoffs.

“Funny. You should quit making hay on your guitar and tell jokes instead, eh?” He jerks his chin at the payphone booth on the opposite corner of the square as he yanks off one of his dancing shoes. “Call Lily, let’s get a drink.”

James hefts his guitar and, glancing to and fro to check for any stray cars in the busy square, crosses to the booth and leaves Sirius to finish changing out his shoes. Sirius laces his street shoes, stands, and wads up the jacket and stuff it into his duffel bag, quickly unbuttoning and peeling off the dress shirt beneath to shove it away just the same. He’s glad to have worn a black undershirt beneath it all, so even stained with sweat he at least looks like he’s just been out and about for a long time instead of venting a passion that gnaws at him like a parasite most days. The trousers are muted enough to stay.

He takes a moment to swig from his half-emptied and warmed water bottle from the corner of his bag, and he watches the square bustle about around him for a moment. It’s nice to just watch sometimes instead of _be_ watched, as much as his insides clamor to be seen on the regular.

If Sirius could sate his spirit with anything besides flamenco, he would take it up in a heartbeat and throw dancing to the curb without a second thought. But the rhythms and the feeling of the dance have rooted themselves in his core, twined around his heart to hold fast until he likely draws his last fucking breath.

It’s exhausting. Nobody else understands the feeling like Sirius can describe it, not even James and his good-as-a-fifth-limb guitar.

Sirius re-ties his hair just as James reemerges from the phone booth and waves him over with a nod, gesturing to the northeast end of the square toward the street that leads to their favorite café. Sirius hefts his bag, throws on his sunglasses, and clamps down on the restlessness still humming in his veins.

_Shut up, carajo, I just fed you for fifteen fucking minutes. Give me some peace!_

Sirius wishes, not for even close to the first time, that he could find any other outlet in existence.

He wishes he could find a way to give his rioting spirit some rest.


	2. Salida

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doubt runs deep, but curiosity goes hand-in-hand with resignation to dig one hell of a chasm alongside it.

_“El mundo es un pañuelo.”_

—Spanish proverb 

—  


“Hola, Minnie!”  
  
Sirius stumbles into the studio with one boot on, pulling the other up his ankle as he hops noisily across the wood floor. The other dancers look at him through their flat-back stretches with varying degrees of amusement—all warm but most with a very knowing roll of the eyes thrown in alongside—when he pauses to rake his hair up into a piled twist and flash a winsome smile at the room.  
  
“You deign to join us,” Minerva says from the front of the studio, her left arm flowing into a long stretch as the rest of the company follows her movement. Ever in the statuesque black of her long practice skirts and countless matching leotard tops, the one spot of color on Minerva is the silver-shot bun of copper hair gathered tight and low at her neck. She raises an eyebrow at Sirius in the mirror as he moves to his regular spot by the wall on the left. “Did one of the engines explode today?”  
  
Sirius looks down at his shirt to see it flecked with black spots he hadn’t noticed in his haste to lock up Arthur’s garage. He had realized he was late for rehearsal ten minutes ago and, of course, didn’t recall that he had forgotten to throw an extra shirt into his rucksack until he was rounding the corner past Argus’ ground floor liquor store to climb the steps to the dance studio above it.

  
“Next time you have car trouble, remind me to charge you extra,” Sirius quips. He sets into the warmup stretches along with the rest of the company, leaning to free the gaps between his ribs with long pulls of his torso, and lets the rest of the day behind him melt away into the tape spinning rhythmic guitar and crisp compás from the old stereo system.  
  
Theirs is a small dance company, but Minerva has always preferred it that way. _Taló de Plata_ , she calls them; seven dancers with silver heels indeed. Sirius is a veteran of the group, joining up twelve years ago when he was only 11 years old and boundless, back when it was only four of them—first Minerva coaching Sirius alone, soon joined by Marlene and then Dorcas. Besides Sirius as the only native to the city they’re all mutts from across Europe who managed to find themselves in Madrid at some point in their separate lives before deciding to stay, and each of them had wandered into Minerva’s studio for classes somewhere along the way until they’d been dancing and performing at small theatres together for long enough to call it a company.  
  
Xenophilius had joined when his wife made him find a hobby after he’d come to Madrid to marry her, and he took to flamenco like a duck to water. Amelia and Molly came along as expats after a few years, Molly the unlikely saving grace to Sirius’ post-E.S.O. disaster of runaway dropout aimlessness for her husband Arthur’s need for a mechanic’s apprentice at his garage just south of the Plaza de Santa Ana. It had been messy and difficult and earned him several fresh scars on his knuckles but after years of feeling afloat in a city that never quite felt like home, even as his birthplace, Sirius had finally found something besides dancing that wasn’t painfully foreign to his heart.

Against Sirius’ racketing reminiscence, Minerva leads the dancers from their stretch into a footwork warmup that Sirius knows like his own pulse. The dig of heel and toe driven by his thigh muscles, locked into the straight-up pull of his core, warming up his back in the instinctual and automatic posture of pride the dance assumes—it feels good. It feels familiar. Sirius only ever wonders, slightly now with a gnawing thought at the back of his skull, why that familiarity has lately felt like monotony.

It isn’t as though he hates the dance. He could never hate something that kept him sane through tumultuous upsets of existence pinning him with lance after lance in life’s sordid tauromaquia. But flamenco has become something of a nagging partner to Sirius over the past year or so, a spouse he still loves but with whom he can hardly share the bed anymore for the way it prickles his subconscious with something almost like guilt. He can’t track when it first began—the feeling that he’ll never surpass the last several months’ long plateau, that his sense of rhythm has stopped evolving, that he’s reached the limit of pushing his body to engage with the music. It was maddening for a while before he began to just accept it. He can’t tell which side of the equation is more dangerous.

“Ciao, perrito, how was the other day with James?”

Sirius pulls himself out of his deep-thought tar pits and smiles at Marlene to his right as they both continue the pattern of toe-heel-heel-heel-toe-heel-heel-heel hammering out along the studio floor. McKinnon, with her funny English-tinted Spanish even after years of fluent speech and her short curly haircut, has been Sirius’ favorite of the company since she started coming to class only a couple years after Sirius started. Her unabashed attraction to pretty girls had earned her a hopeless attachment to long-limbed Dorcas when the other girl first entered the studio a couple seasons after, and it had only taken four months of pining between the two of them until Sirius’ puckish goading finally pushed them into an accidental date. Now going on four years, Marlene and Dorcas have the sort of partnership that normally would make Sirius scoff at for its sugary perfection—if only he hadn’t the pride of pushing it to fruition.

“Six-thousand pesetas,” Sirius replies. His forearms strain sweetly with the combination of the wrist circles Minerva adds into the warmup and the tiredness of his muscles leftover from the garage. He recalls the headache from the morning following his blaze of glory through the city’s watering holes with a meager fistful of coin and feels a mix of regret and fierce conviction. “We spent it all on grappa.”

“Of course you did. You could save for new shoes, you know.” Marlene glances knowingly at the worn red leather on Sirius’ cantering feet, painted and re-painted at the toe and heel over the last several years. They fit him perfectly and sound like lightning incarnate, but even he has to admit they look battered to filth.

“These are _lucky,”_ Sirius insists with a sharp gesture at his feet. He sniffs indignantly as the first round of footwork warmup closes and Minerva continues to add more arms, moving the press of motion into Sirius’ upper back and shoulders with his elbows raised in their natural and expert arc. “I have lots of shoes, I just prefer to wear these.”

“Bring back the silver patent ones then,” Amelia chimes in from the back of the group.

“We haven’t seen the blue suede in months either.” Xeno grins at Sirius in the mirror with his addition from the far right of the studio.

“What do you need the luck for anyways?” Dorcas snorts from behind Sirius.

“To fuck your father,” Sirius says easily, winking at Dorcas in the front mirror as she rolls her eyes and Minerva sighs audibly from the front.

 _“Sirius.”_ Her voice colored with warning as it ever was through Sirius’ teenage years tugs at the eternal boyhood at the pit of his stomach and makes Sirius relent—only slightly—with a dramatic look over his shoulder at Dorcas.

“To _seduce_ your father,” he amends, breaking into a hapless smile as Dorcas turns a wrist circle passing in front of Sirius’ face into a slow and blatant middle finger.

Minerva glares at Sirius with a teacher’s good nature in the mirror and ignores his streak of vinegar through the rest of the warmup. Soon, sufficiently limbered and tuned-in to their bodies, the company gathers in a loose half-circle before Minerva as they do at the head of every rehearsal. She pauses the stereo system and turns to her dancers with her arms crossed genially, shoulders back and stance open as if she’s always dancing. Her posture has entranced and more than slightly intimidated Sirius since he was a boy.

“We’ve a show in two months at the small theatre in Malasaña, I finally got the contract yesterday,” she begins, her face tightening with reigned frustration for whichever disorganized director has the misfortune of being on Minerva’s bad side. “We’re going to combine several of the dances we’ve taken to stage before—the alegrías, the tientos, Marlene and Sirius’ bulerías, potentially our farruca, some others we can see if they’re ready today and through the next few weeks,” Minerva explains with a graceful wave of her hand. “James will be playing and Lily is singing for us, they’ll start coming in next week to put some dances together. Peter might be able to lend percussion, I haven’t heard from him yet. I’ve a couple other thoughts in the works that I’ll share when I have finite decisions on them, does anybody have questions?”

“How long is the program?” Dorcas asks, pressing an extra stretch into her long legs with her practice skirts tucked up around her waist.

“Fifty-minute halves with a ten-minute intermission. It’s nothing we haven’t done before, but I do want to run through everything today so we have it polished for the musicians. _Vale?”_ Minerva looks around at the company before turning back to the stereo when there aren’t any lingering questions. “Alright, let’s run alegrías first.”

The rehearsal goes smoothly overall, but internally Sirius finds that he’s more than a bit of a mess. He stays on time and makes all the right sounds and rhythms with his footwork, but his execution is muddy at best—try as he might, he can’t seem to pull the power or conviction of what he knows he can do out from his core, even in a section as simple as the castellana and the easier passages of the tientos. He catches a frown from Minerva more than once. The farruca is fine if not rusty from the majority of the company for having gone several months without touching it, and Minerva walks them through some spot rehearsing toward the end of practice to shore up rougher patches. Sirius feels the wind leave his sails even before Minerva approaches him subtly as the company breaks to pack up and leave for the day after a solid three hours.

“Sirius.” The director’s tone is expectant but gentle, and even then Sirius can’t meet her eyes for than a moment as he pulls of his shoes.

“Sorry. I’ve been in a strange place lately, Minnie.”

“Strange place or not, you know what you’re capable of,” Minerva says in a low voice, always cognizant of keeping her dancers’ individual private battles from being broadcast to the entire studio. “Have you outgrown the group? Do you need something different?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! This is my home, you know that.” Sirius looks at her sharply, vaguely wounded for the thought she could think of Taló without him in it.

“Home or not, I know how a plateau can feel. You’ll tell me if you need a change, won’t you?” Minerva looks at him expectantly, those eyes of hers as keen and feline as ever, and Sirius nods quickly.

“I promise I’ll have it under control before Malasaña, heart crossed and bleeding,” Sirius lies easily through his teeth—there’s no way he can know how long this pit will last, but he doesn’t want to worry his director with his own stupid preoccupations. Minerva raises an eyebrow as though she only believes him halfway, but she nods nonetheless.

“Fine. Can you cover my class on Tuesday then? My brothers are in town, if I don’t have at least one drink with them I’ll never hear the end of it.” She offers him a thin smile, and Sirius knows his struggles are forgiven. At least for now.

Sirius has his rucksack zipped up and his jacket thrown on just a bit later when Marlene catches his attention by tugging gently on his ponytail.

“You were dancing like a mess today, is that grappa still stuck in your system?” She asks. Sirius scoffs, knowing Marlene understands the trials of braving an uphill climb with her skills but wanting to put the discussion of his shortcomings to rest for the day—plenty of time to pick all of that up later.

“Perhaps,” Sirius replies shortly. “I think I’ll go home and drink more to give it some company, care to come with?”

“Can’t. Dorcas and I are going to a tablao show tonight, you should come too.”

Sirius sighs, loathe to go out of his way to watch other dancers unless Minerva has told them to see a particular show. There’s plenty of good flamenco in Madrid, but there’s also plenty of pure garbage. “Where?”

“Chueca, the little cantina by San Anton.” Marlene smirks when Sirius raises an eyebrow. “You’re not the only one who likes to slink around the gay bars, sombroso.”

Sirius snorts, hefting his rucksack up higher on his shoulder. “I don’t slink, I saunter.” _Fuck it,_ he might as well let himself take a break from hyperfocusing on his own dancing for one evening. “When should I meet you there?”

“Around 8:00, we can get a good seat and have a drink before curtain. And try to dress a bit nicer, no?” Marlene doesn’t wait for an affirmative from Sirius before planting a kiss on his cheek and peeling off to meet Dorcas at the studio door. “Don’t be late,” she calls in finality, waving sunnily to leave Sirius wiping away the smudge of her red lipstick left on his face.

“The Chueca show,” Xeno pipes up from beside Sirius, meticulously packing his shoes away with the sort of reverence reserved for saintly remains, “that’s Albus’ company. Pandora is good friends with their guitarist, Benji. Will you let me know how it is? I’ve been meaning to catch a performance from them.”

“Verdad, I’ll keep on eye on whether we blow them out of the water too,” Sirius replies with a smile. “You can’t come along?”

“I’m watching Luna tonight, but I’ll be there in spirit.”

“Children are an adorable and necessary plague,” Sirius says in farewell as he heads through the studio door. The gentle teasing of Xeno as the only parent in the company besides Molly is the closest they all have come to hazing.

Outside the studio, Sirius hops into the phone booth on the corner and thumbs a coin into the deposit slot. The line warbles for a moment before Lily picks up.

“Dorcas and Marlene and I are going to a tablao tonight, bring James,” Sirius says without preamble.

 _“Nice to hear from you too, Sirius, yes, I’m doing just fine, thank you for asking,”_ Lily deadpans from her end. Her English habit of conversational inanity is Sirius’ favorite button to push.

“I saw you yesterday, I already know you’re doing fine,” He drawls into the handset.

 _“Where, and when? I have a voice lesson later but James could go.”_ One of Lily Evans’ finest qualities is, in Sirius’ opinion, her tendency to make plans for her boyfriend without consulting him directly. James adores her too much to protest.

“Chueca, right near San Anton. Curtain at 8:30, we’re getting there at 8:00 for a drink.”

_“Which company?”_

“Not sure, Marlene just told me to come along. Xeno said it’s Albus’ group.”

_“Sure, James will be there. Let me know if their singer is any good, will you?”_

“Xeno knows their guitarist, Benji, an old friend of his wife’s. All you Brits know each other, were your parents anti-fascist spies together or something?” Sirius leans against the fogged glass of the phone booth and idly winds the handset cord around his fingers. Lily laughs.

_“It’s called community, Sirius, you should find one sometime.”_

“I have _community,”_ Sirius sneers the word back in exaggerated English. “It takes the form of wine bars and handsome men.”

 _“Ah yes, you’re very civic-minded,”_ Lily says with mock seriousness. _“How goes rehearsal?”_

Sirius’ gut pulls with the reluctance to admit shortcomings to anybody besides himself. “Just fine, we have a show in a few months at Malasaña that we started rehearsing for. You and James will be on that one, no?”

 _“And maybe Pete too, if we can pull him away from his other gigs. I’m eager to see you dance, perrito, it’s been too long!”_ Lily’s sisterly whine is charming, and Sirius smiles into the phone.

“Just as much as I want to hear you and James, hembrita.”

_“DON’T CALL ME THAT.”_

“Conejita?”

_“You’re insufferable. James will be there at 8:00, don’t let him drink too much. He has a gig with Nott tomorrow.”_

Sirius pulls a face as he shrugs his bag onto his other shoulder and checks his watch—he should get going if he wants to be at least presentable. “Gross. I’ll tell him not to go.”

_“He needs the money, don’t plant any other seeds in that head of his. Have fun, I’ll see you at the studio next week?”_

“Ciao, Lily.”

Sirius hangs up and slides out of the phone booth, stepping aside and gesturing openly to let an old man hobble in for his own phone call. As the city hums around him, streets thick with cars and pedestrians and the smells of late afternoon, Sirius sighs at nothing—a nothing that feels strangely of aimless frustration and the yearning for change. He’s no _good_ at change. He’ll just have to see where the days take him then.

—

The cantina is crowded when Sirius arrives just before 8:00, changed from his ratty work shirt into a buttoned top and slack along with a jacket that makes his arms look fantastic if not a bit light for the weather. He searches around for a dark mop of curls beside a long twist of pin-straight blonde when he ducks into the basement stage area, and he finds Marlene and Dorcas at a tabletop close to the stage.

“Good pick,” Sirius says as he lowers himself into one of the two open seats. He looks over the label on the wine bottle on the table for the sake of something to with his hands rather than an actual interest in the vintage before pouring a tall burgundy glass of it.

“All the better to watch their feet,” Dorcas says. Marlene greets Sirius with an air-kiss to his cheek and clinks her glass against his.

“Take a sip whenever one of them stumbles, down the whole thing if someone falls,” she explains. Sirius laughs at the pettiness.

“Did we come to watch them or curse them?”

Dorcas smiles a lion’s smile at him across the table. “Both.”

“Who’s dancing?” Sirius picks up the show billing beside the wine bottle and scans it as Marlene leans over to read along with him.

“Albus’ company, they’re small,” Dorcas explains, the most in-tune with the local companies amongst the three of them. “It used to only be Benji and Albus on music with Alice and Frank dancing, but it looks like they have a third joining them now.”

_Zorro de Fuego — Albus Dumbledore & Benji Fenwick, cantaor y toque — Alicia & Franco, baile dueto. Remus Lupin, baile solo. _

“I still think it’s silly they use Spanglicized stage names,” Marlene snorts into her wine glass.

“You go by ‘Malena,’” Dorcas points out, raising an eyebrow at her girlfriend. Marlene rolls her eyes, ever the contrarian.

“Not the same thing.”

“Who’s Remus Lupin?” Sirius pulls at the conversational thread as he turns the billing over to look for a photo and is only met with blank cardstock. His competitive instinct has flared with rooster-proud ferocity at the pit of his heart to know the identity of another male soloist, another body in the wide world of dance he hasn’t seen yet. Is this Remus Lupin just another innocuous attempt at somebody’s flailing reach for machismo, or is he truly a threat to Sirius’ wobbling confidence?

“Never heard of him before, hopefully he isn’t awful.” Dorcas shrugs and Sirius is about to make a quip about perhaps hoping _is_ awful—something barbed and witty to mask his own insecurity with sass—when James enters and sits down heavily in the little wooden chair besides Sirius.

“Do you mind telling me why Lily shoved me out the door at half-past 7:00 with nothing but a goodbye kiss to explain why I was forced to come see a cantina show I didn’t know was happening?” He pours the rest of the wine bottle into his waiting glass and scowls at his three compatriots in turn, landing on Sirius with an expectant frown.

“She’s having an affair with your next door neighbor, just getting you out of the apartment to have time alone,” Marlene says portentously.

“Our only neighbor on the floor is a widow, try again.”

“Exactly! Experienced, amorous, lonely, knows just what to do with her hands…” Dorcas trails off and makes a gesture completely foreign to Sirius but apparently right on the money as Marlene cackles and James makes a sound of protest around his first sip of wine.

“All three of you are awful. Who’s dancing?” James wipes his mouth with his thumb and forefinger before he reaches across to pluck the billing from Sirius’ hands. He scans it quickly and nods. “Benji is good.”

“Do you know the new dancer? None of us can figure out if we’ve seen him before,” Marlene says. She lights one cigarette with a battered red lighter and another with the end of the first, passing the second one to Sirius to share as the only two habitual smokers out of the four at their table.

“Who, Remus Lupin?” James squints at the billing again through those silly thick-rimmed glasses that Sirius thinks only James can truly pull off. “Never heard of him, not even among the musicians. New in town?”

“Maybe so,” Sirius says through an exhale that makes him feel, blessedly, like his muscles are finally relaxing. “And maybe he’s just not very good and word doesn’t travel.”

“You’re such a hen. Let me have one too, Marlene,” James jabs at Sirius as he grasps the air for Marlene’s carton of cigarettes.

“Promise me that Lily won’t come after me for enabling you.” Marlene gives James a look as she passes one to him along with her lighter, not waiting at all for his pledge of honesty.

“I’ll follow Sirius to one of the bathhouses to wash off afterwards so she won’t smell it,” James snaps. Sirius bursts with a spatter of laughter.

“You are _woefully_ ignorant as to what goes on at a bathhouse. You might pull more than me, though, especially with that blazer,” he says loftily, shooting a devilish grin at James as he earns himself a good-natured glare.

They catch up amongst themselves, talking about whatever they can besides flamenco to give their minds a rest—or, at least Sirius does his best to steer the conversation to give _his_ mind a rest. He’s about to sit through just over an hour of dancing, and he’s already swallowed more than enough of it throughout the day. Sometimes, Sirius Black feels as though he does a very poor job of being a professional dancer.

After just over half an hour, a smattering of applause begins and threads its way through the cantina as the small company of musicians and dancers take their place on the stage, the compact raise of sturdy wood at the center curve of the table setup. Sirius recognizes Albus immediately from his years spent dancing in the city, his immaculate grey beard and smiling eyes a-shine, wearing another one of his ubiquitous black turtlenecks like a beatnik. Benji, with his guitar held easily in one hand, is a marginally handsome man with a complexion so fair that his eyelashes and brows are almost invisible as he looks across the catina and smiles at his audience. The duet dancers, Alice and Frank, walk tall and proud and look more like siblings than spouses, but Sirius would never stoop to that level of gossiping—he has it in him to be bitchy, but not to the extent of pissing off other dancers just for kicks. Alice sports a chic mod haircut, short and dark and slicked flat with her sideburns coiled into classic flamenca curls beside her ears, with a red-and-black bata de cola that matches Frank’s vest and trousers. Frank’s shoes are, disappointingly, plain black patent leather, but Sirius has never expected very much outspoken flair from a man with a name like Frank Longbottom to begin with.

Sirius’ judgemental eye comes a careening halt when he looks to the third dancer _._ The first thing Sirius notices is his neckerchief, an unapologetic burst of shimmering turquoise ruffles against a solid black shirt and vest. His trousers are the traditional high-waisted slim cut, black as well, tracing long and powerful-looking legs down to feet outfitted with the most striking teal shoes Sirius has ever seen, with gold metal-plated heels and gold-thread embroidery up their sides like climbing ivy. Sirius stares, cigarette frozen midair halfway to his lips, and drinks in the man’s easy posture and aura of pure confidence as he bows to the welcoming applause along with his company members. The dancer has sandy brown hair in waves like melted caramel, tamed down into a parted coif that just barely skirts his forehead. Sharp green eyes look out over the crowd while a slight smile sits on his full, impossibly sweet-looking lips, and Sirius can’t make himself look away when they lock eyes for the briefest tick of a moment. Something like flint strikes, sudden and white-hot, just behind Sirius’ lungs, and it takes root to smolder for what is suddenly looking to be a very interesting tablao show.

Remus Lupin, the unknown third dancer, is somebody Sirius would like to know _very_ much indeed.

The first two dances might as well be folly as Sirius tries and fails to focus on the offerings of first a lively tangos from Frank and Alice trading letras, followed by a guajíras with both of them that rouses most of the audience to lots of fun, light-hearted jaleo in response to their well-placed winks of humor as they dance. Sirius tries his best to call out at the right moments along with Marlene and Dorcas and James, but he finds at least half the time he’s too entranced with watching the way Remus sits and gives palmas beside Albus. If he strains his ears hard enough Sirius can almost possibly pick out the sound of his voice amid the music; honeyed and exuberant, bright like the flash of gold at his heels.

As the audience applauds the guajíras and Benji starts a number of his own, Sirius tries not to dig his fingernails too sharply into his palms with impatience. Who is this man, looking like some sort of ancient god down from the hills in Granada, teasing at the promise of dancing in front of them all with a stature that makes Sirius think of polished marble carvings? The guitar solo lasts for too long. Sirius smokes a second cigarette down too quickly, wasting the tobacco but not caring; he’s antsy. He hasn’t been antsy in a very long time. Sirius’ vision of the cantina has tunneled to anonymity around him, and all he can focus on is Remus. This is new.

This is very, very uncomfortable.

After what seems like an eternity, Benji closes his solo with a flourish and the cantina applauds. Sirius throws his own into the mix, loudly, for perhaps now this signals the first he gets to see of this alluring new dancer, this stranger to Madrid that may as well be some kind of portent for Sirius’ own strife. The cantina goes silent as Benji and Albus situate themselves and adjust their seats slightly, and Benji starts in on a rasgueo that melts into the steady pulse of a seguiriya. None of the dancers have stood yet to let this introduction progress, and Sirius feels as though he’s holding his breath. He downs a gulp of wine with reigned desperation and watches the stage like a hawk.

Albus adds his voice to the opening, a smoky and shadowed voice that’s seen much of life and more that Sirius has always enjoyed. The cantina offers subdued jaleo in response to the contours of their music, and Sirius’ heart almost leaps into his throat as he watches Remus ease into a stand with all the gravity of one completely in-tune with the music. Benji’s strumming builds in several driving measures of compás, continuing beyond Albus’ closing phrase of singing to lead into a the glorious and sudden freeze of Remus bursting with a tight interjection of footwork to begin the dance with a flick of glorious purple fan in his left hand.

Remus follows the contour of Benji’s plucked melody with graceful turns of his fan and slow, solid taps of crisp footwork while the company behind him begins to give soft palmas, and Sirius feels as though he’s slipping further and further into a dream with each step. Remus carries himself like a king, with all the quiet bravado that becomes a dancer as he wields the fan with the sort of confidence necessary to make it augment his masculinity instead of diminish it. It’s incredible to watch, the duality of grace and power as Remus’ footwork builds over and again like waves to crash on the beaches of the audience’s approval.

Sirius gives jaleo like he rarely has before, too rapt to care that James might be rolling his eyes— _”Dale, guapo!”_ —and earns another brief moment of eye contact with Remus. Even from several feet back from the stage, muddled by what he knows is a sort of fog of war onstage and trying at once to separate from and connect with the audience, Sirius feels those eyes like brands on his core. He adores it.

The dance enters the escobilla after several breathless minutes, hours, however long or short it is, all Sirius knows is that he will never be able to get enough of this. It isn’t just that Remus is handsome or and intimidatingly good dancer or has lightning-quick footwork that could put most veteran dancers to shame—no, Sirius sees it now in the escobilla as Remus closes his eyes and leans into the music, digs into it like he embodies the sounds and rhythms themselves; Sirius has always thought the idea of duende is bullshit, something made up by the poets who have nothing better to do but masturbate over their own words, but this? _This_ is duende. Of that he is absolutely certain. Sirius is smitten.

Which is a fucking disaster, but he can’t find it in him right now to hate that fact one bit.

The seguiriya folds in and around itself as the angular rhythm always does to Sirius’ ear, one of his favorites to watch but never one he’s been terribly partial to dancing himself. The second-to-last letra, dramatic and attenuated, leads ceremoniously into the final series of footwork, and Remus looks the absolute picture of glory—his face is blushed with effort, a single curl of his hair fallen loose with sweat to hang down just over his left eye, and yet his posture holds almost with _more_ power against the exhaustion. The energy of the dance rises like heat from the earth’s mantle, Remus’ footwork doubling in tempo to match the flutter of the guitar and the driving lead of Albus’ voice, and the crowd’s energy rises with it. Encouragement bursts from the audience and Sirius feels it deeply, his vocal cords almost cracking around _“Alé!”_ as the exclamation leaves his throat like a bullet. The energy is otherworldly. Sirius has never felt this from watching another dancer.

When the final round of footwork comes up, building madly with all the syncopated perfection and hectic splendor of an incoming llamada, Sirius realizes he’s at the edge of his seat and gripping the edge of the table so hard he can feel it biting into his hand. He doesn’t care. He’s magnetized, and he only wants this dance to go on for a bit longer, just a bit longer, each time the next series of compás begins. But he knows with his own dancer’s instinct when the music is coming to close, sees it coming like the edge of a storm on the horizon that he wants wretchedly to break over him; Remus closes his buildup with a solid hammer of his soles perfectly in time with Benji’s final strums and the palmas from the rest of the company and he finishes in a pose with his fan open, arced above his head with a stare fixed on the back of the house that looks absolutely predatory. Sirius notices as he bursts in raucous applause, with a pull all the deeper parts of his instincts, that Remus has a faint tattoo of what looks like a crescent moon on the back of his hand holding the fan, blurred previously in all the graceful twists of movement throughout the dance. _Fuck._ Sirius has a weak spot for tattoos.

“That was fucking incredible,” Marlene says sideways to Sirius just under the din of appreciation for the dance. Sirius doesn’t take his eyes from the stage for a single moment as he nods—no words, just the sting of his palms as his hands shout his own amazement while Remus takes his bows. Sirius devours his presence with a gaze starving for the proof of why Sirius needs flamenco like water, drinking deeply on the sight of Remus Lupin.


	3. Marcaje

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sunday blues turn into Monday woes, and life as a strange way of adding to them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The liquor-store-beneath-the-flamenco-studio thing is 100% drawn from life and I can tell you so many stories about being complained at mid-rehearsal by a man who is literally Filch. Enjoy ^^

_A beber y a tragar, que el mundo se va a acabar._

—Spanish proverb

—

Leaving the cantina is far harder than entering it.

The side street where Sirius and his compatriots gather after the café space clears is vibrant, lively with clusters of people on to the next cantina for tapas or wine or both and more. It feels almost like an assault on Sirius’ senses, sheared thin and raw by the spectacle of watching Remus dance, but he does his best to keep it from showing. Sirius had briefly entertained the idea of lingering to get a scrap of a chance to speak to the dancer guised in saying hello to Albus, but Marlene had dragged him out into the night with a pull to his arm that clearly said _You absolute mess, come with me before you make an idiot of yourself._

She’s right, but Sirius doesn’t have to like it.

“That was fun,” James says with an invigorated smile, lighting one more of Marlene’s cigarettes. _Fun?_ Sirius wants to say, point in James’ face and pluck that cigarette out from between his fingers, _Fun?! That was fucking transcendent._

“I think Sirius is enchanted,” Dorcas says easily. She has one arm draped across Marlene’s shoulders as both women fix him with knowing smirks, and Sirius knows with a sinking feeling that his internal impulses have shown right through his face.

“I’ve never heard you give jaleo like that, Mister ‘I only give jaleo if they do something I can’t.’” Marlene mimics Sirius’ voice before she blows smoke to the side, up into the air to mingle with the yellow glow of the streetlamp above them, and flicks her ash to the street tidily. “The only thing he did that you don’t is dance with a fan. Is that what lit your fancy? Hot for a bit of ruffle and glitter with all your macho posturing?”

Sirius feels his cheeks burn with embarrassment, but he can’t deny it without lying up a storm. Sirius Black is many things, but he isn’t a liar. “Maybe so, but at least I was subtle about it,” he says, turning his nose up slightly as he takes James’ cigarette anyways despite the man’s indignant squawk. Dorcas bursts with laughter, her lower voice cutting through the din of the street more sharply than Marlene’s.

“Subtle? If that was ‘subtle,’ I cower to see what ‘blatant’ would be from you.”

“You all but came in your pants, perrito. Don’t worry, we’ve all done it,” Marlene says with mock coddling as she reaches over to pat Sirius on the cheek. He scowls at her in return as James shoves his hands in his pockets and snorts.

“Speak for yourself, you bloody desviados. Are we for tapas or not?” He looks expectantly at his friends, dark eyebrows raised above the frames of his glasses, and Dorcas nods as she readjusts the jacket draped open over her shoulders.

“I think so, shall we?”

“Espera, Sirius might need a change of clothes first,” Marlene teases, still on her incessant train of comedy, and Sirius glares at her again as he takes a long, purposeful drag on the stolen cigarette.

“If you want to talk about my dick, you can at least do me the favor of sucking it first,” he fires back as he flicks the half-finished tobacco into the curb gutter beside him while James makes a disappointed sound. Marlene laughs, tossing her curls for the ridiculousness of the suggestion, before putting the sharp vee of her index and middle fingers up to her mouth and waggling her tongue at him in the space between them.

“The second you develop a taste for pussy just let me know.”

 _“Alright,_ alright, ave María, you two are the fucking worst,” James interjects. “Are we going or not?”

“He’s just touchy because he’s smitten,” Dorcas whispers theatrically to James as Marlene winds herself around her girlfriend’s arm, tossing a sunny grin at Sirius when he scoffs at the lack of support from any of his friends. “Come on, Sirius, we promise not to say any more about it.”

“Speak for yourself, amor.” Marlene’s sing-song is limned with wine, and Sirius wonders not for the first time why in the everloving hell he spends any time with these fucking idiots. But he loves them, so he follows Dorcas’ tall saunter down the cobblestones into their favorite bar in Chueca.

James is slightly out of his element here as the only straight man among them, but he’s plenty comfortable with the atmosphere after years of taking gigs in all different corners of the city and weathering his friendship with Sirius. Marlene and Dorcas order fare for the four of them while Sirius scouts a high-top table by one of the open windows. He enjoys absorbing the air of the city while it’s still mild enough to be comfortable in early September, but his pulse is still vaulted in his veins as he looks around and tries to relax. James nudges Sirius’ arm and presents an expectant look when Sirius turns to him.

“What.” Sirius frowns automatically and James exasperation flattens further.

“You’re allowed to make eyes at talented men, despite what las zorras like to say.” James cuts straight the point with a nod at Marlene and Dorcas. Sirius appreciates it, but he still keeps his frown.

“I don’t get in with other dancers,” he insists, his eternal mantra after surviving the aftermath of the American ballet dancer who shattered his heart in the summer of 1979. It’s worked for him up until now and he doesn’t plan on going back.

“I know,” James sighs with a tone that makes it clear he isn’t convinced, but Sirius doesn’t prod. “But you’re allowed to _look_ for something, you know that right? Whatever it is you do to...scout.”

Sirius arches a doubtful eyebrow at the way James flutters his fingers noncommittally at the breadth of men packed into the bar. _“Scout?”_

“You know what I mean! It isn’t ‘dating’ because heaven knows you aren’t spending any time with them outside of the bedroom—what! I’m right!” James throws his arms out to the side in protest as far as they’ll go amid the press of evening drinkers when Sirius barks a laugh.

“I appreciate you trying to insert yourself into my love life, but I don’t need the help to remember how under-rehearsed I am at wooing someone,” Sirius says loftily. He offsets the bite of it with a thin smile, ignoring the pull in his guts that echoes in him for the deep-rooted truth in the statement. James looks like he’s about to say something soothing in his unique and endearingly-awkward way, but Marlene appears then to set a plate of olives and cheese at the center of the table. She slides a pair of wide-bellied red wine glasses over to the men while Dorcas reaches over her with two more, and Marlene raises hers with a grin.

“Salud, to the desviados!”

James rolls his eyes as he and Sirius offer their own chorused _Salud_ and they drink deeply—Sirius tries to pretend he doesn’t see a flash of brilliant purple and turquoise in his mind’s eye when he closes his eyes through the quaff.

It’s nice to be out like this, doing something besides holing himself up in the studio all night to feed the gnawing of his nerves with footwork practice or trying to lose himself in the anonymity of another man’s body at the darkened corner of a disco—but Sirius still feels a vague sense of unrest fused to his core as he blithely follows the conversation pattering around him between his friends. He isn’t usually one for cafés in general, why the fuck did he say yes to coming along when Marlene invited him earlier? He _never_ says yes to tablao unless Minerva tells him to go directly. Sirius grits his teeth and finishes the last of his wine and a few of the olives before he drops a shallow stack of pesetas onto the table to interrupt a story from James about trying to restring a neighbor’s guitar.

“You’re off so soon?” Dorcas gives Sirius a mildly surprised look and glances not-so-subtly at her watch.

“It isn’t even half-past eleven, grandmother, stay a bit later,” Marlene insists, tugging at Sirius’ sleeve when he fixes to turn from the table.

“I’m tired,” he says simply in a tone he hopes isn’t snappy. He needs a walk and he needs to stop drinking—Sirius doesn’t like the combination of this strange, humming pseudo-adrenaline still coursing through his heart mixing with the gauzy press of alcohol.

“Are we going to see you at rehearsal Monday? If you’re late you owe us an evening out. A _full_ one,” James insists. Sirius catches the little flash in his eyes behind his glasses, the _It’s okay, get yourself home_ that Sirius is entirely grateful he doesn’t have to address.

“I’ll be there early, don’t get your hopes up. Descansad.” Sirius raises a hand in farewell, not bothering to kiss any of them goodnight, and sidles his way out of the café into the street.

The atmosphere is the papery pre-autumn type that takes most of its warmth with it when the sun goes down, so as Sirius heads for his apartment away from the warm and lively press of the bar he braces himself against the slight chill. His pathway back to his neighborhood takes him back around past the café, where he can still hear the uneven five-beat hammer of footwork in his thoughts  when he looks at the door a-glow with post-show revelry. He should go in. Perhaps the company is still inside, perhaps—

 _Go home, carajo,_ he stops himself with an inward hiss, halfway across the street before he turns back to his destination. This is silly. All he needs to do is put his head down, work on cars, and keep dancing; it’s worked for the last five years, and it will keep working as long as he stays in his own lane. If he doesn’t think about it too closely, the boiling in his blood will calm down. _Should_ calm down.

Hopefully.

Sirius reaches his building and shoulders open the heavy main entry door in off the narrow street in Lavapiés. He shuts it as softly as he can behind him, not wanting to draw the sour wrath of the ground-floor tenant who has posted more than one note of complaint on his door the mornings after the rare occasions of Sirius bringing somebody home and not being sober enough to keep from laughing his way up the stairs to roust the entire building. Tonight he’s solitary, the way he likes best underneath all his layers of showmanship and wit. It gets exhausting sometimes to keep his personality running smoothly.

The old spiraling stairwell, worn marble and stone smoothed down by decades of feet, scuffs softly under Sirius’ steps at he climbs toward his apartment. The fifth floor greets him with its two doors, like a pair of eyes shut tight against the hour, dark inside; the painter who lives next door retires early like clockwork so she can rise just as sinfully early every morning to wake Sirius through the thin walls with the sounds of symphonic music as she works. Sirius hasn’t ever had a conversation with her lasting longer than three minutes. They’ve been neighbors for three years.

Sirius keeps the lights off as he unlaces his shoes and sets them carefully on the rack by the door, in with the other immaculate pairs of boots and loafers of his. The care he lavishes on his dance shoes extends to all his footwear, even his work boots—he supposes if he can only find it in him to go out once or twice a week, he may as well look sharp doing it.

To his unending frustration at himself, Sirius still feels the quiver of anticipation in his guts leftover from the tablao show. _It was nothing special, it was a good dancer who happens to also be an attractive man and you’re placing fantasy where it has no business going. Just go to sleep._ Except, Sirius knows as he pulls his shirt off and undoes his belt to step out from his trousers, it _was_ something special. That was the sort of performance Minerva always tries to pull from the company when she gets in the mood to really harp on technique—drawn up from the wells of passion, it had electrified the very air itself and imprinted itself on Sirius’ sense of direction and want.

As he slides into bed, Sirius finally admits to himself that he’s intimidated. He’s also fiercely intrigued.

He’s _also,_ he assesses with a maddening combination of fury and thrill, been half-hard for the past two hours.

Trying to pretend he hadn’t been aroused by the performance clearly didn’t work. Sirius looks up at his ceiling, traced by faint touches of moonlight coming in through his bedroom window, as the unbidden thread of recollection tugs against his determination to not let this get out of hand— _You don’t get in with other dancers, you don’t get in with other dancers, stop playing with fire—_ and yet the spark of purpose that flared inside him when he made eye contact with Remus, each time, was undeniable. Sirius doesn’t want to risk the leap that sort of adoration would take. He’s spent too many years carefully molding himself into somebody who doesn’t need anything besides his friends and his dancing, somebody who’s able to freely and easily go from man to man without the tangled strings of attachment binding his limbs.

 _Has that really been so good for you though?_ Sirius shuts his eyes hard and fast against his doubtful critic, so quiet these days for anything besides flamenco, why would it rear up now? He sees a twist of purple again at the back of his imagination, wound about a ribbon of turquoise and gold, and he feels his heartbeat bloom eagerly in response. “Fuck you,” he hisses to the invisible force of his impulses as he reaches down beneath his sheets to wrap a hand around himself.

Occasional pornographic magazines notwithstanding, Sirius Black usually doesn’t get himself off to imagined fantasies of other people. He’s vain enough to let himself be the driving force of his pleasure, the warmth of his own hands and the feeling of his own body plenty and more to get him up and over the edge whenever he wants it. He tries hard not to think of the image of Remus dancing at the café, the power in those legs and the incredible posture of his arms, his core, every line of his body a perfect and attenuated chord. _Shit._ Sirius is a hopeless wreck. He hasn’t said two words to someone who might very well be the antichrist in a pair of teal shoes, and here he is getting off to abstract thoughts of the man dancing.

Well, at least nobody can claim Sirius is unpredictable.

He sighs into the slow twist of hand and lifts his hips slightly to meet the rhythm of his strokes, closing his eyes and seeing abstract striations of ruffled movement in black and white as he turns his head to the side against his pillow in indolent splendor. It feels good, and it feels necessary. Sirius has been drawn thin and stressed for the past month and beyond—he hasn’t bothered to keep track of when last he didn’t feel like he was going to implode at any moment—and he’s only had enough energy lately for hasty moments in the shower in the morning to work himself off under the spray of warm water. It’s rare that Sirius is awake enough for a truly attentive spot of time to himself at night, the best sort of selfish aside to put the world beyond on hold for just a moment.

After several minutes lined with quiet sounds of encouragement to himself against bitten-shut lips, breath coming hot and fast through his nose as his limit mounts like a seguiriya that refuses to slow its buildup— _1-2-3, 2-2-3, 3-and-4-and-5,_ it cycles through his mind amid shades of purple and the shape of his hand teasing just the way he likes best at his length—Sirius feels the roll of incoming completion begin burning just behind his heart and in the pit of his pelvis at once. It’s all-encompassing and overwhelming, and as Sirius’ vision goes blessedly white and he gasps around arrival, he has one thought: _Duende._

If he weren’t riding high on his own climax, Sirius would scoff at such ridiculous poetics.

He lets himself bask in the wash of completion and catch his breath for a moment before cleaning himself off with a handful of tissues from his nightstand, and then he drops almost immediately into a death-deep sleep that leaves him no room for any other dreams of jewel tones and the hectic rhythms of his heartbeat.

—

Sunday passes in a weekend blur, with several hours spent at the empty studio running through incessant droves of footwork that make Sirius’ body ache but quiets the racketing for it in his veins. The sound of the seguiriya has infected him, thoroughly and sharply, and he can’t help but try to drive it out by feeding the dance back in and around to itself. It works for only a couple hours before rolling back, and by Monday morning Sirius promises to see it out by rehearsal that evening as he washes his hair with a bit more vigor than normal— _You’ve overstayed your welcome, diablillo. Time to go._

Down the stairs, out to the street, the morning is brisker than usual and does well to wake Sirius’ more lethargic edges. He listens to the city waking up around him as pale sunlight makes itself known over the crenellated and tiled roofs raking up above him along the old streets of Lavapiés while he walks. His bag, weighted with three pairs of dance shoes and a _full_ change of clothes this time, digs comfortably into his shoulder as he walks west, closer to the Manzanares, and anticipates the bite of his morning espresso.

There shouldn’t be anything unique about shouldering his way into the coffee shop six blocks south of Arthur’s garage. Four times a week, Sirius orders an Americano from one of the four baristas—Daniel, Leonora, Francisco, and Stela, he’s been on a first name basis with all of them since he started working for Arthur—and kills twenty minutes at one of the single-top tables by the window. Then he goes to work, forgets everything besides engine mechanics and hardware tunings for the better part of four hours, spends his siesta polishing his footwork on a thick slab of wood at the back of the garage, and buries himself in more work until closing up just after five in the evening. It’s been a staunch routine since Sirius completed his apprenticeship at the garage and it never feels different.

But _today_ feels different, as though the morning is lined with a strange humming kineticism, even before Sirius looks up to see a new barista behind the counter.

The man looks vaguely familiar even though Sirius can’t for the life of him place why. The sense of _I know you, why do I know you?_ prods at the back of his thoughts as Sirius catalogues him subtly from the door—handsome in a quiet sort of way, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, a whirled crop of light-brown wavy hair; he’s leaned over an open book beside the register and reading with a little furrow between his eyebrows as Stela works at the espresso machine behind him. He’s fairly tall, clearly not a Spaniard but lacking the obvious aura of a backpacker or one of those bleeding-heart artistic expats, and Sirius is immediately curious. He ignores the instinct that tells him he’s met this man before and heads over to the counter as Stela turns to smile at him.

“Hola, Sirius, your Americano today?”

“Whenever is it anything else?” Sirius draws a handful of coins from his pocket and eyes the new barista with as much tact as he can gather, trying not to stare but also grasping madly at the sense of familiarity rattling his guts. Stela serves up the cup and saucer she had been preparing to a woman across the counter and nods at Sirius before she turns to her coworker.

“Bueno. Remus, can you prepare that one?”

Sirius’ entire body freezes as the name punches into his sternum. How many people with that name can there be in Madrid? Perhaps only one, and it’s now—of course it’s _now,_ Doña Destina hasn’t given him a break since he met Molly and Arthur—that Sirius notices the crescent moon tattoo on the back of the barista’s hand. Fuck. Jesu Christo alive and burning, he’s the dancer, he’s the _fucking dancer,_ that—

“Sure, do you like anything extra mixed in?” Sirius clenches his jaw and tries not to look at though he’s just swallowed his own tongue. He settles for shaking his head with a sharp toss when he doesn’t trust his voice, and Remus smiles easily in confirmation as though his voice isn’t the perfect pitch of fluent Spanish mixing with a native undertone that’s barely noticeable but definitely British, something light and cantering around the Iberian curve of the language. He turns to the espresso machine and Sirius is glad that Stela is busied with casually overseeing Remus’ work at the machine so Sirius can wrestle his sense of sanity back up from his depths on his own.

“Are there any interesting cars in the garage this week?” Stela asks over her shoulder. Of course her incessantly sunny disposition wouldn’t keep her from trying to converse as she trains a new employee—Sirius clears his throat and shifts his bag higher on his shoulder with a subdued fidget.

“Ah, one old motorcycle from Ruebus that Arthur is presently trying to de-rust, and I’ve a Mini from the woman around the corner that needs a new fan belt.” _Get it together, stop staring at his back, don’t look at his hands like that, stop fucking staring—_

“You’re a mechanic?” Remus asks brightly, still concentrated on the machine but throwing an interested glance over one of the shoulders Sirius is trying and failing not to eye-fuck too obviously. “Do you do work on vespas?”

“We work on all types—” The bursting hiss of the steamer drowns out Sirius’ words for a moment before he starts again, feeling unhinged and open like an uncapped circuit. “We do all types of vehicles, it’s Arthur’s garage just north of here with the slingshot logo. _Pellirojonda.”_

Remus chuckles to himself and Sirius grits his teeth against the pleasant cadence of the sound. It isn’t enough that he’s a fantastic dancer, is it? He has to be alluring in person as well. Sirius very suddenly doesn’t know if should bring up the tablao performance or not.

“That’s a good name,” Remus says as he knocks the used grounds out of their mechanism while the espresso percolates.

“Arthur is a goofy guy, you’ll meet him soon I’m sure,” Stela says with a smile. She looks up at Sirius and Sirius latches onto the familiar sight of her round, open face like a liferaft amid all this floundering. “This is Remus’ first day, he’s a graduate student at UCM.”

“Guay, what do you study?” Sirius asks quickly, desperately grateful for the plain-toast topic Stela has served, something so much safer to ask than _How long have you been dancing like you were born from fire?_ or _What does such incredible footwork feel like?_

“Spanish literature. I’m doing analysis of the new Lorca sonnets, my advisor was one of the original translators.”

Sirius forgets, for just a moment, to be preoccupied. “No shit? I love Lorca.”

“Verdad?” Remus raises his eyebrows as he carefully pours a measure of hot water into the espresso cup. “Which of his is your favorite?”

 _“Adam.”_ Sirius blurts the title as he might have his own name had Remus asked him for it instead of Stela introducing them, like a string of molten sweetness pouring from his lips at once with the speed of expulsion but with the silvery drip of half-liquid surety. He could hardly have picked a poem with more queer overtones to it, but Remus smiles at him again and Sirius decides not to care.

“Guay,” Remus parrots back at Sirius, and Sirius can’t be imagining the flash of something enigmatic and wholly enchanting behind those glasses. The words are on the tip of his teeth, _How do you dance like that, how do you tame raw passion and make it do your bidding,_ but Stela swoops in with a lean on the counter and a bright smile before Sirius can dig his own grave.

“Remus arrived to the city last week, he’s from Ireland,” Stela explains as though she’s the weekday newscaster Sirius can always hear prattling on from the tiny antennae television Arthur keeps on in his office in the afternoons, always politics— _The PSOE continues to rise in popularity, with Galván still winning the hearts of many._ Stela’s own politics are always the little histories of her coworkers and her regulars, the benign gossip that fuels her energy at the shop like conversational petrol.

“I suppose you come to Spain mostly for the Lorca?” Sirius asks, hoping with just over half of his mind that Remus might spare him the embarrassment of having to gush about the tablao show if he just reveals his penchant for dance himself.

“Entirely for the Lorca,” Remus amends with a smile, which makes Sirius’ heart pull madly for its sweetness. “If I’d wanted to follow the espresso I should have gone to Rome, no?”

“Watch your tongue, novato,” Stela says with mock seriousness as she points between Remus and the espresso machine. “Would you like to try paying rent on nothing but your study stipend?”

Remus laughs, and Sirius only remembers to stop staring with his thumb begins to tingle with the heat seeping through the shot cup he had forgotten to sip on until now. Stela isn’t flirting with Remus—she’s exceedingly married to the other barista Daniel, and being gregarious is just her default setting—but it still tugs at the depths of Sirius’ core to watch the man bantering with someone who isn’t himself. _Well, it’s certainly been a while since you’ve been around here, comodoro Aimless Jealousy. Make yourself fucking comfortable._

Sirius extricates himself from Stela and Remus after he pays and folds himself into the smallest table in the far corner of the shop to drink his espresso down in no time flat. He tries his best to keep himself from staring over the counter, but his memory keeps pushing him to layer the image of Remus onstage overtop of his place behind the counter. It’s disorienting, _maddening,_ and Sirius is furious at his inner workings that are normally so collected. Sirius Black is the suave one, Sirius Black is one who leaves other men speechless and dumbfounded at the foot of a stage or in the interior of an espresso bar. But as ever, the universe is delighting in turning his better-laid routines to waste.

Sirius Black is, in a word, fucked.

He buses his cup and saucer with a distracted little wave to Stela when Remus ducks into the kitchen, not trusting himself within a single breath to say something even vaguely coherent in farewell to the man. The walk to the garage is noisy, a racket of pedestrians and cars and the general pulse of Madrid—Sirius feels as though he’s liable to burst out of his own skin if he can’t put the fixation out of his mind. _Remus;_ the name is sussurative when he thinks it, foreign, its vowels unevenly pleasant to the hollows of Sirius’ skull. If he mouths it to himself once by accident while waiting for a traffic light to change, just to see how it feels on a soundless tongue, he refuses to acknowledge it.

Arthur is blessedly subdued today when Sirius arrives at the garage, already working on the undercarriage of a horrific sport car that may well have been vomited into the present out of the year 1961. He leaves Sirius with vague pleasantries grunted around the effort of wrenching at a gasket—”Hola, how’s your— _fuck_ —your morning been— _vengaaa!”_ — which Sirius takes to be his permission to shut himself away with the Mini. The afternoon passes then much like Sunday in a smear of time and distraction and the world’s most unrestful siesta. _Remus, Remus, Remus,_ his imagination chants as he tries to chase out the fixation with leagues of footwork that make his thighs burn. By the end of his shift, he’s only cut his thumbs once on the guts of the engine.

After leaving Arthur to lock up the garage, Sirius gets to the studio in three quarters of the time it normally takes him to walk there for the virility of his frustration-fueled power-walking. He’s had all day to stew on the discomfort of being so drawn to a man with whom he’s had half a viable conversation, and he’s come to the conclusion that it’s frustratingly and completely out of his hands at the same moment he’s realized he’s going to have to tell Marlene and Dorcas the dancer he was melting over last night works at his regular espresso bar. _Hostia puta, tengo que decirles esas dos_ —

“Ay! Watch it, maricón!”

Sirius spins with the intent to shout a colorful reply back when someone bumps his shoulder only steps away from the door up to the studio, but the relief of habitual mischief relaxes him immediately. “How’s business, Argus?”

Argus Filch scowls at Sirius with his pipe between his yellowed teeth, skulking outside his liquor store entrance for a smoke. “Better when your troupe isn’t plodding around upstairs and shaking my store like the Annunciation.”

“Relax, querido, we only rehearse in studio two when it can’t be helped.” Sirius winks at Filch to carve the old man’s frown even deeper as he sucks on a low, dark puff of tobacco. Sassing the life out of the bag-of-bones shopkeeper always brightens Sirius’ mood somewhat, and it works like a charm now.

“Let me smoke in piece,” Filch growls, “so I can go back in and strap down all my shelves before you ruin them.”

“Be lucky we’re just dancing upstairs and not fucking,” Sirius says loftily as he turns to the studio door. “That would _really_ get the bottles shaking.”

Filch mutters something blackened and flagrantly offensive that Sirius doesn’t bother to take personally as he lights the stairs to the studio. He still feels compacted, torqued, a strange sort of undone-and-badly-cobbled-back-together that he’s never felt before, but at least he’s made himself smile at the ridiculous fun of prodding at an old man’s intolerance. He’s one of the first into the studio proper and making small talk with Amelia by the time most of the company has trickled in and Marlene arrives two minutes before rehearsal begins.

“Ciao, are you still boiling alive?” Marlene kisses both of Sirius’ cheeks as he stretches a wide pull of his hip muscles before she plops down to unlace her street shoes. Sirius snorts derisively.

“Not nearly,” he lies as best he can, pretending to wince marginally through his stretch. “Quiet Sunday.”

Marlene hums with the expert read that she doesn’t believe him as far as her tiny frame can throw him. “And by quiet you mean…?”

“Fucking frustrating,” Sirius huffs. He flops to the floor on his elbows, his feet still flat to stretch the base of his pelvic muscles, and pouts at Marlene. “You know I don’t get hung up on shit like that, _why_ did that performance hit me so deeply?”

“Because you’re in love,” Marlene coos, buckling her beaten pair of practice shoes with one hand while the other squeezes at Sirius’ cheeks to make his lips poof out like a fish.

“More like cursed,” Sirius deadpans through the blubbery bulk of his lips crowding his teeth. “The universe has it out for me, Doña Destina likes to jack me off and then leave before I can finish.” He accents the lament with a lame toss of his wrist in the air and Marlene laughs at him as she lets his face go before patting his cheek solidly.”

“Oh, that’s dramatic.”

“Truly! Do you want to hear the worst of it?”

“You found out your mother came back to life?”

Sirius barks once with true mirth at Marlene’s equally-dark sense of humor. “Nothing so dire.”

Marlene smiles to herself and rakes her hair up into an unruly pile at the crown of her head. “What then, did you run into your santo del flamenco on the street?”

Sirius finds accidentally that his silence speaks volumes as Marlene tracks his expression with narrowed eyes before they fly wide again.

“Don’t tell anybody,” Sirius hisses, falling out of his stretch when he reaches a hand forward to grab one of Marlene’s to plead with her.

“Where!”

“Don’t say _anything.”_

_“Where!”_

“Stela’s coffee shop, on my way to work. He works there, he’s a student, he just arrived recently, he didn’t say anything about dancing—”

Dorcas suddenly sweeps in like a swan with an intrigued look on her face. “You look calm,” she says with ichor-thick sarcasm as he eyes Sirius, “who put a mosquito in your trousers?”

“He ran into the seguiriyas dancer at his regular coffee bar,” Marlene blurts immediately.

“Marlene, me tomas en pelo?!” Sirius gestures at her sharply with palm-up open hands and his face pulled into grimacing desperation. Marlene only shrugs with feigned innocence.

“She deserves to know, she was there.”

Dorcas bites her lips together with barely-contained mirth and the very obvious air of someone who knows a secret. _“Pues,”_ she says simply. Sirius almost shouts into the echoing mirror planes of the studio for the enraging propensities of women before Minerva enters with Albus Dumbledore close behind. _Oh fuck._ Oh fucking fuck, Sirius going to have a stern talking to whichever saints or devils are playing with his life right now when he ends up in their company someday.

“Gather please, I’ve an announcement.” Minerva’s voice projects with all the finesse of her strage training, and Sirius’ stomach drops when he sees Frank and Alice walk in, all smiles, ready to rehearse. That means—

Remus walks in without his glasses on in rehearsal sweats and Sirius wants to die and ascend to the astral plane in the same breath. There he is in all his glory, black practice boots and sculpted bare arms and all. Sirius could just as soon tear his eyes away as he’d be able to spontaneously sprout wings and use the feathers to suffocate himself standing.

“Ni di coña, it’s Americano!” Remus exclaims with pleased surprise, his hand out for Sirius to shake. Marlene laughs again, wild and free, and Sirius manages just enough control over his motor skills to reach out and clasp the crescent-tattooed hand in greeting. It’s warm. It’s strong. It’s slightly calloused in familiar places from castañuelas.

It feels like arrival and a sheer cliffside at once, and Sirius knows in that moment that he wants to leap from it, proverbial wings or not, and feel the wind of happenstance dragging at his skin like music.


	4. Paso de Bulerías

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The difficulty of newness is only a challenge for another few days. Then? Then it becomes an inferno.

_De músico, poeta y loco, todos tenemos un poco._

— Spanish proverb

—

Two weeks pass in the strangest whirlwind Sirius has felt in a long time. It’s a quiet one, roiling distantly like the Biscay up north through his heart and lungs with equal fury, but it rattles his spirit and keeps him awake more often than not. It’s as though Sirius is floating constantly on a plane not entirely of his own reality—something conjured up to enchant him, manic, grounded only by routine and the grip of fast-heavy footwork to hold him down on earth.

He tries going out to Chueca on his own, twice, to get in a solid shag and wash his system. Both times leave him with a bad taste in his mouth before he even gets to the point of making a move on the man making eyes at him, and so he’s gone home alone since the night of the tablao. What could he call it? Infatuation, shock, enamorment, _patochada—_ all the words he digs at in the dark of his flat every night feel...lacking. So he stops trying to define it soon enough and decides to try just existing. 

Easier said than done, but it works well enough.

His ritual at the coffee shop each morning gradually turns into more than just rote as Sirius masters his nerves as best he can. The subtle shuddering excitement each day finally comes down from the internal chant of _Mierda, mierda, mierda, mierda_ whenever his heart does those maddening flips in his chest to see Remus behind the counter; down to something more akin to the pleasant buzz of undefinition upon taking the stage. Well, not entirely _pleasant,_ but at least he doesn’t want to hurl himself into the Manzanares after the first five days.

Remus and the new additions to the company take up space at rehearsals as though they’ve been there all along, which is a relief that helps the cooling of Sirius’ literal and figurative heels. After the initial surprise of seeing them join the studio that day, Marlene laughing with victorious humor as Remus had given Sirius that handshake and a smile like the sun itself _—Mierda, mierda, mierda, mierda—_ it was a seamless transition from two companies into one. It only took half a rehearsal for the three new dancers to adapt to Minerva’s warmups and the way she runs through choreography, even less time for Benjy to make fast friends with James at the back of the studio and pair their strumming like two rascally-looking cherubs in a church frieze. At the end of that first evening Remus had approached Sirius, winded and grinning and entirely too lovely for his own good, and apologized with another firm handshake for not recognizing Sirius at Stela’s because he hadn’t worn his glasses onstage. _I never do, it keeps me from getting too nervous if I can’t see their faces._ Sirius hadn’t been able to hold in his laugh at that, relieved and desperate and slightly manic.

Since then, they’ve all been trading choreography and learning one another’s steps like sharing stories at the bar in preparation for future shows. Sirius should be happy, _thrilled,_ that the only group of people in Madrid worth anything to him has just grown fivefold, but he can’t divine anything deeper past his tangled insides beyond vague anticipation.

It’s fucking annoying.

Despite the caginess Sirius hopes isn’t so visible from the outside as it feel prickling between his lungs, Sirius gradually learns more about Remus through his brief mornings at Stela’s café: he’s here from Britain for graduate school, Albus is an old family friend of his, he’s been dancing since he was a boy—his father is an ambassador with gitano roots—and he’s the most beautiful person Sirius has ever laid eyes on when he gets to talking about himself. Sirius knows some would argue the last part is entirely subjective, but he likes to think of it as plain fact to make him feel like less of a hopeless fucking disaster. Remus Lupin is devastatingly handsome, even more so since he doesn’t seem aware of it, and _nobody else is talking about it._ Sirius wants to scream sometimes, more often than not lately, at this entire godforsaken peninsula.

“Ciao,” Sirius announces as he lopes over the studio threshold an entire four minutes before rehearsal is due to begin. A smattering of greeting goes up from the rest of the company in various states of shoe-fastening, skirt-straightening, and pleasantry-trading, and Sirius holds white-fisted to his internal reigns to keep from responding to Remus’ bright _Hola_ by bursting into song. Remus has one hand on the worn barre along the one unmirrored wall while the other pulls, long and deep, to bring his left foot back and stretch his thigh muscle, and Sirius is _not_ looking at the patch of skin showing between his trousers and his shirt—he settles his bag at the corner several strides away from Remus and runs the monotony of brake system setups through his head to keep him sane and is _certainly_ not thinking of Remus’ iliac muscle. He pulls his boots on with a bit too much force, but thankfully nobody notices.

Minerva arrives exactly four minutes later and swings the windowed door shut behind her. “Bien. Let’s talk about a show then, shall we?”

With her unique and militant director’s efficiency, Minerva lays out the program for their Malasaña show with the new company members woven in: martinete to open with Remus and Alice; farruca with Xeno, Frank, Amelia, and Molly; tientos with Sirius, Marlene, and Dorcas; solo fandango for Xeno; guajíras with Frank and Alice; bulerías with Sirius and Marlene; solo seguiriya for Remus; and alegrías to close with Molly, Amelia, Alice, Marlene, and Dorcas. “Preguntas?” Minerva looks around the studio after firing off the list from a page in her brimming pocket planner, and James raises his hand from beside Lily and Benjy at the back of the room.

“I don’t mean to be an ass, but is there any room to fit in music breaks?”

“Absolutely, we aren’t barbarians. But we’ll discuss music once we figure out what the company has under their belts well enough to take to stage.” Minerva fixes the dancers with a sweeping look, challenging their muscle memory with one elegant brow raised, and Sirius feels his insides ignite suddenly with the feeling to prove his mastery. _Well, buenos tardes to this fucking sensation as well._

The door swings open as, automatically, the company swings their attention to it, and Peter Pettigrew enters with pink cheeks and the bulky shape of a cajón roped over his shoulder. “Sorry! Traffic is a fucking alboroto out there, what’s happening downtown? I meant to be here ten minutes ago, sorry, sorry.” He holds up a sheepish hand as he makes his way to the back of the studio, and Sirius lends him a fraternal clap on the shoulder when he passes. The percussionist has been a friend of his and James’ since they ran into one another on a bender after James moved in with Lily a year ago—entirely celebratory—as another one of these Brits stuck to Spain like the most pleasant kind of burrs. Pete has played for several of the street shows Sirius has done with James for the drink money and the practice, and Sirius has always enjoyed the way his playing adds a certain depth to the music behind him beyond simple guitar. Presently, the promise of it lends a welcome comfort to the general theatre of Sirius’ insides as he waits for Minerva to direct them to their first order of practice.

James lets out a low whistle when Pete pulls his cajón out of its soft case, a shining new one polished to a dark sheen of some chocolatey red wood. “Did your mistress give you an advance on your escort payment?”

“Very funny, payaso,” Peter huffs, rolling his eyes as he rolls up his sleeves and sits atop the instrument, wide-legged with that extra chub he’s always worn well. “I’m testing out a new build for Mundungus, there are more snares on the inside. It’s on loan, not mine.” He skips his fingers across the top of the box with a tight snap of rhythm to bring out the instrument’s percussive hiss, and an approving hum goes up from the rest of the company.

“Perfect, this will go well for today.” Minerva stands at the head of the studio and puts her hands on her hips as she surveys the dancers. “As you might have noticed, some of you are getting a bit stuck—whether that be in old habits or in your own head.” Sirius feels the director’s attention on him even though she isn’t looking at him, and his insides roil just a bit with more of that new competitive baiting. _Fine then, just let me prove you wrong._ “I’ve admittedly been lax on pulling you all out of your comfort lately, so today we’re going to be working on improvising.” 

Sirius’ eyebrows goes up as Marlene nudges him with an elbow and Dorcas chuckles to herself. Minerva quirks a smile at the general approval from the company, a rare sort of smile from her writ through with a note of understanding that makes Sirius feel less like he’s about to pitch himself from the edge of a precipice. He glances around at the rest of the dancers to see a similar sense of amusement from each of them, but stays himself from looking over at Remus to his left. _Don’t risk it._

“We’ll do six-and-six.” Minerva makes her way over to the musicians where Albus has already taken a place to give palmas. “Six compás solo, six compás with the person who comes in behind you, you leave and they continue with six solo, the next comes in behind them for a duet, and on like that until everyone is done. Vale?”

“Vale,” the general murmur of the company replies with a consensus of approval. 

“I’m sure you have a canta that’s long enough, Lily?”

Lily rakes her hair up into a loose bun and smiles, nodding at James’ guitar. “He can fill my gaps if we need to.”

Sirius can’t help but sound a wolf whistle at that, which earns a loud laugh from James and a sisterly scowl from Lily as the company groans for the painful accuracy of Sirius’ unflagging penchant for innuendo.  

“Who goes first?” Minerva cuts in crisply. She ignores Sirius’ interjection, as ever, with the acuity of a schoolmistress.

“I’ll go,” Amelia offers as she steps forward to take the center of the studio. The rest of the company peels back, and Sirius unconsciously puts himself as far to the end of their forming line as he can get. Unfortunately—or quite fortunately, depending on whether one decides to ask the angel or the devil on his shoulder—he isn’t the only one with machinations of going last.

“Do you do much improvising?” Remus’ voice is closer than Sirius is prepared to hear it as Albus and Minerva begin setting a nice middle tempo in their palmas, and Sirius’ heart wrenches sweetly for the proximity. 

“Not as much as I probably should—” Sirius pauses and drops his voice as Lily begins her introductory cante. “My own choreography is getting a bit tired lately.”

“Guay, you do much choreography?”

“Only enough for street shows once a week or so,” Sirius waves a non-committal hand when it feels like the failure to move at all might cause him to suffer a stroke. “It’s good conditioning, and James likes the ego boost of making tourists ask whether or not he’s Paco de Lucía.”

Sirius is wholly unprepared for the gift of a chuckle that pulls from Remus, straight to Sirius’ core to smolder mightily at his defenses, and he replies with as un-fractured a smile as he can manage while James and Peter enter alongside Lily’s powerful and declamatory voice. Amelia begins dancing then and Sirius is heartily grateful for something to focus on besides the one dimple on Remus’ right cheek or the way the faded university logo shirt hangs on that broad frame of his.

_“Deja que llegue el domingo, deja/Que se recojan las cabras/Que no tienen domicilio…”_

Amelia’s style is a liquidy sort, born from her early years of training as a ballerina that still controls her willowy frame no matter how fiery her response to flamenco gets. Her face is proud, looking down that sharp nose of hers at her own reflection as though challenging herself to do more, push harder, stretch that line of her arms just a bit more and get just one more turn out of that pirouette. Sirius appreciates her upper body work but has always found her footwork lacking—tidy and accurate, of course, but not nearly as intense as Sirius likes his rhythms to be.

Frank joins in on the ten-beat of Amelia’s final solo compás, and Sirius barks out a mild “Vamo’ ya!” Frank’s dancing is similarly angular but with a less-trained cant to it that Sirius isn’t entirely sure about. He hasn’t had much time to talk to Frank about the man’s history with dance because honestly, when they’ve time to trade niceties after rehearsals, Sirius is hardly eager to talk any more about the art they’ve just finished hammering out for two or three hours. Sure, his bones scrape for it at any given hour, but when has Sirius Black ever obeyed his instincts beyond the impulse for a good fuck?

_“Personas que se han querido/Y se encuentran por las calles/O se mudan de color/O se hacen un desaire…”_

“She’s got a past in ballet, hasn’t she?”

Sirius looks up with a start when Remus asks his question softly, glancing sideways at Sirius through the corner of his lashes. Sirius swallows and scrapes for sanity for a half-second before he nods. “Sí, do you know that fucking gauntlet well?” 

Remus sniffs a laugh and shakes his head. “Not me, no, but my mother danced ballet for many years when she was young. I’d know those hand habits anywhere.”

Sirius bites down his lip to keep from firing off another habitual joke about _hand habits,_ only smiling as he lets it pass. “I’ve been lucky enough to avoid it myself,” he settles for murmuring.

 “I’ll be sure to judge your own turn quite thoroughly then, to make up for lost time.”

Remus’ wit sounds on Sirius’ ear like the bright and ringing harmony of belonging, but Sirius doesn’t let himself dwell on that for more than a moment. He fixes his attention back on the dancers as Amelia moves off to let Frank take his solo, and on into the rest of the group.

Alice joins her husband for their duet that looks very much like marriage incarnate, with several little hiccups of step trading before they share a laugh and abandon the attempt at synchronizing to stomp along in steps all their own. Alice’s following solo is mostly footwork, quick and angular like the patter of her voice, with her skirts up to her knees to follow the fast twelve of the music.

_“Malaya sea este sueño/Que tanto he dormido/Que se han llevao ami compañero/Y yo no lo he sentido/Que se han llevao a mi compañero/Y yo no lo he resentido…”_

Remus and Sirius don’t trade any other side-chatter while the rest of the company gives their shot at the wide swath of varied styles between them, only giving jaleo and watching as their fellow dancers puzzle out the six-and-six in their own unique ways. Xeno follows Alice with his powerful machismo that still manages to hold surprising delicacy; Dorcas comes up after him with all her long arms and expert turns, joining him in a perfectly-executed mark step around one another with a shared grin before Xeno leads off. When Marlene bursts in on the sixth beat of Dorcas’ last solo compás, Sirius gives them a rousing “Así se baile, guapitas!” He should feel like rolling his eyes when, after their duet, Dorcas exits a turn by planting a kiss on Marlene’s nose, but Sirius only feels a pleasant little smolder in his chest to cheer them along with the rest of the company.

Wonderful. His own preoccupations are making him soft.

_“Quisiera mejor estar loca/Y mis penas no sentir/Porque sintiendo mis penas/Mis penas no tienen fin…”_

Molly comes in to share a complex llamada with Marlene that they somehow both land perfectly in-sync, which draws up loud approval from the rest of the company. Molly, all skirts and curling flyaway hair, is an enjoyable foil to Marlene’s compact intensity, and watching them dance almost makes Sirius forget that he’s due next until he catches Remus’ eye and the man throws him an expect little grin.

“Ready?”

_Mierda, mierda, mierda, mierda._

“Of course,” Sirius lies smoothly as Molly enters her third compás, ignoring the sudden triple-beat of his heart. _Mierda de mierda,_ Sirius has to share a dance with Remus. He hasn’t thought this far in advance, he hasn’t given himself time to process it—Molly enters his final compás and Sirius’ feet decide then to take over, charging him gracefully across the floor over to Molly in the center on her final eight. _Es ahora o nunca_.

_“Mi pena es muy mala/Porque es una pena que yo no quisiera/Que se me quitara…”_

Sirius relies heavily on Molly’s guidance for their shared compàs, following her lead by a two-beat trail. He can feel Minerva’s eyes on him through the mirror as he goes along, arms poised and feet sure but still wrestling with that sense of restriction— _Don’t let go, brujo, keep it reigned it, if you let go of your control you’re ruined._ His poisonous habit of locking down his limits suddenly feels very much like a snakebite, sudden and violent to his heels, and he stutters into the last llamada that Molly pulls up. _Don’t let go, don’t fucking let go._

Sirius makes the mistake of glancing over at Remus as he comes out of a tight, whipping turn, and their eyes meet in a flash. _But would it really be such a bad thing?_  

_“Vino como viene, son saber de dónde/El agua a los mares…”_

Lily’s voice and the music bursting to life behind it suddenly bites down on Sirius’ instincts, struck like flint on his ribs to spark against the mossy kindling of Remus’ attention. Fuck it. Fuck his stubborn insistence on perfection, fuck the restrictions he puts on his own talents, his own desires, his own fucking _existence_ that he’s been so unable to shake for his entire life.

Nothing matters besides the present and the shape of interest flashing behind Remus’ pupils like the snap of a purple fan or the hammering of golden heels in a smoky café when Sirius had least expected it.

 _“Los vientos al monte/Vino y se ha quedao en mi corazón/Como el amargo/¡La corteza verde/Verde, verde, verde limón!”_  

The company goes up in an uproarious cheer and Peter’s rhythm on the cajón compounds with encouragement besides James and Benjy’s unflagging strumming to support the sudden burst of unfettered footwork that Sirius executes alongside Lily’s cascading vocals. He pulls the corner of his shirt across his waist as he would a vest with his elbow up, brow furrowed in passionate concentration as his feet continue to seek the rhythm in freed exuberance, with his free arm curved above his head to give sharp and syncopated wrist circles. True enjoyment suffuses Sirius down to the ends of his body, and he lets it carry him aloft like the surge of a riverbed.

Sirius stares himself down in the mirror, overcome with the sudden drive to create, and tries to remember what it felt like to first put on a pair of flamenco shoes and just let sound be born from his body. For the first time in what feels like an eon, Sirius allows the music to infect his bones and truly drive his body instead of letting the more restrictive side of himself win out and rule the direction of his dancing with an iron fist rather than this florid, gorgeous, languid feeling currently filling him to the brim. The company encourages each twist of his waist, every counterbeat in his heels; the dance wakes his soul, God save his bleeding fucking heart.

He only remembers he has to share such vulnerability with Remus for seventy-two beats when the other man enters in a llamada that mirrors Sirius’ own steps perfectly, and by then Sirius is too gone to the feeling to be worried.

_“Pá qué tú me preguntas, qué viento corre/Siendo tú la veleta y yo la torre/Malaya sea la persona/Que me ha enseñao/A querer/Que estaba yo en mi sentío/¡Y ahora me encuentro sin él!”_

Sirius had been wrong to think he couldn’t fall any deeper into this full-bodied trance of bulerías. His attention is fully on Remus’ body, Remus’ cues, the way he holds himself and way his feet speak rapid and wordless command of the music into the floor, away from the mirror now to only absorb the perfect glory of Remus surrendering to the dance as well. Had Sirius not seen him perform at the tablao two weeks ago, he would have been struck immobile by the fluency and strength of Remus’ technique—it’s natural to him in the way that dangerous grace inhabits a wolf, all instinct, all beauty, all power. The headiness of it twines around Sirius’ own intent and they’re sharing their compás the same way Sirius suddenly believes it would be to share breath with him, and before he can stop that thought it siphons down through his veins and emerges in an explosive combination of stamps, heels, toes, and arms that has never in his life felt so natural.

The music builds like wildfire as Remus and Sirius dance to feed that stoking energy, James’ fingers flying along his frets as Lily begins the closing several beats. Sirius hears the melody’s approach to finality automatically, like the closing remarks in a rousing speech, and he realizes he’s forgotten to leave and let Remus have his solo six—but if that look behind Remus’ eyes is anything to go by, Sirius hasn’t offended him in the slightest.

It’s over in several quick turns and traded call-and-response between their feet, and then Sirius is heaving breath in his final pose and staring through himself in the mirror as he’s thrown from the heat of the moment like an ember arcing away from the hearth. The company applauds the performances as a whole, impressed jaleo flying around the between them all, but Sirius is deaf to it. He looks over at Remus amid the buoyant atmosphere and knows he isn’t imagining the flutter of something undefined and painfully beautiful that flashes through his expression—flushed, exerted, _carajo,_ he looks thoroughly fucked and Sirius can’t seem to shake that distant thought.  

“You would have been a good ballet dancer,” Remus pants in English, just under the din of the company’s chatter.

“And why is that?” Sirius pulls a hand through his ruffled hair, tangled by such untamed movement, while he replies in the same tongue. He hopes he isn’t just imagining the underlying hunger in the way Remus tracks the cadence of his words and the gesture with an encompassing flicker of his eyes.

“You’re a right champion, you just paled the rest of us in comparison.”

Sirius wants desperately to rebut that with something, anything, any sort of truth along the lines of _It was only that good because I felt safe to have you watching,_ or _Something came to life in me just then and that never happened before you were here,_ or even _Chorradas, I’m nothing compared to you,_ but—blessedly or otherwise—he doesn’t have the chance. James’ hand is on his shoulder and his excited voice is in Sirius’ ear, and Sirius is pulled out of one moment and into the next on the jarring wind of the present.

He hopes, as he turns away from Remus with one last enigmatic glance, that it had only been the first of many to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wahhhhh this took a long time but I’m so glad to finally have hit the HALFWAY MARK [airhorns]
> 
> Thank you for reading! <3


	5. Primera Llamada

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> None of this familiar, nor is it easy, but _joder_ if isn't a change that Sirius might have accidentally willed into reality.

_ “Camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente.” _

—Spanish proverb

—

The days stretch forward like the toffee pull of braceo, and Sirius almost forgets to worry about the very real possibility of going certifiably insane along the way. 

Almost.

Over another several mornings, Sirius establishes what he might chance at calling a warm routine with Remus. Since Sirius isn’t playing avoidance with him any longer after that first morning at Stela’s, it becomes far easier to order his Americano and conduct conversation a bit more fluent than “Guay.” They talk of Lorca, the city, the university, Lorca again, Ireland, Spain, y otra vez Lorca; never flamenco. Remus picks up easily on Sirius’ refusal to talk of the dance away from the studio or the stage, and Sirius appreciates it with unsaid enthusiasm.

He sees Remus studying behind the counter at least half the time each morning, marking his books with all different colored pens that he tends to keep behind his ears in a painfully endearing portrait—endearing in a strictly  _ friendly _ way, of course—while engrossed in the text. He always looks either vaguely rapt or patently miserable before he notices Sirius approaching the register and perks up just enough to make it clear that something, somehow, pulls at his consciousness like the tide against that crescent moon tattoo on the back of his hand. Sirius doesn’t have the pelotas to ask what that invisible something might be, but he’s also been too regularly distracted by Remus’ very subtle propensity for looking relieved and beautiful and eager when Sirius arrives. 

Again, Sirius has told himself every single fucking morning, all of it in a  _ friendly _ way.

The baile por derecho he and Remus had shared smashed open some sort of valve buried deep in Sirius’ guts, a compaction around his inhibition obliterated within twelve compás, and since then he’s felt himself steadily flooded with an outlook might one might see as sunny if they squinted at him just so—Dorcas has smiled sideways at him every so often and called him “flotador” more than once, and Marlene has shot him no shortage of expectant glances in the mirrors during rehearsals whenever Sirius finds himself spending just a bit too long appreciating the way Remus executes a step or a warmup stretch. Arthur has noticed it in the garage as well, commenting on how much more “awake” Sirius is looking these days, with a little waggle to those fucking eyebrows of his that makes Sirius seethe with equal parts fury and pride. He tells himself it’s only because he and Remus are  _ friends _ now, and having friends is  _ nice. _

Fucking the man senseless would also be a certain permutation of  _ nice,  _ but Sirius forces himself far, far away from any hint of daydreaming about that one.

“I don’t get in with other dancers.” Sirius breathes the mantra to himself in the nighttime air as he shoulders open the ground floor door to the dance studio. Each step up the stairs gets its own word in the back of his mind for good measure— _ No. Me. Follo. A. Otros. Bailaores;  _ over and again until he reaches the top step. His rucksack digs into his shoulder with a force that feels distantly like approval, and he’s just begun to smile a bit as he looks forward to the late night all to himself amid the mirrored walls and wooden floor with his new sense of freedom when he hears the rapport of someone else’s feet in studio three. 

Before he’s even snuck up against the wall to peer through the windowed door into the far reflection of the east-facing mirror, Sirius knows that the dancer is Remus.

Nobody else has such crisp heels, such clear triple beats, such a command over the contour of his own sound. Sirius means to enter unceremoniously and take up his own space with unapologetic familiarity—this is Sirius’ mid-week routine, and he’ll be damned if his new friend bucks it any way regardless of how good the man looks doing it—but his chest grips with a strange compression of all his air when met with the sight of Remus to match the sound. 

He dances differently when he’s alone. Sirius watches from the obscured angle through the door and feels it as well, that stark divide between dancing for an audience and dancing for himself. Even when it stinks of a chore, the whipped bidding of his body to obey the gnawing at his marrow to  _ baile, baile, BAILE, perrito, _ there’s a certain selfish pleasure in being the only one witnessing a dance. But where Sirius dances to sate his body, it seems Remus is dancing to  _ feed _ his body.

Remus enters a buildup, all coraje so at odds with his mild daily demeanor, with one hand pulling up on the loose leg of his workout trousers and the other holding out the fluttering hem of his maddeningly-sleeveless shirt as he would the edge of a jacket. Sirius forces himself to stare at Remus’ feet instead of the swath of skin bared with that pull, and it’s then that he realizes the rhythm Remus hammers out along with the familiar compás track on the stereo is the most difficult section of the desplante from Sirius and Marlene’s bulerías. 

By all laws of performance pride, Sirius should be furious. Another dancer practicing his own piece, choreography that he’s all but owned since he was 18 years old, should fill Sirius with snarled teeth to pick at the meat of his heart like sharpened pitos from toe to top. But all he can do is stare. Remus is mastering the segment that Sirius can never manage to get just so, over and over again with perfect accents and clarity—is that a  _ smile  _ as he watches himself in the mirror? Sirius should feel ire, but all he feels is a warm buzz at the pit of his guts. He steps forward, entranced by the combination Remus is weaving with those well-worn white shoes;  _ dig-heel-heel-heel-toe-scuff-triple-beat— _

“Ah, hi there!”

Sirius starts when Remus closes the step with a tidy little stamp, and it’s another half-second before he tears his eyes away from the man’s feet to look up and see him waving through the door with the greeting in English. His stomach drops, but Remus is still wearing that exerted little grin, and one of his curls is tripping down into one eye in its repetitive tendency, and he’s walking over to the stereo to thumb the Pause button. The compás suspends itself in middle of a beat like arrested breath. Sirius blinks. Remus isn’t mad that he was watching. 

“Sorry,” Sirius blurts in Spanish, apologizing aimlessly while Remus pulls open the door and leans on it with his breath high in his chest— _ No, do not look at his arms, don’t look at the sweat at his collar, halt, stop, quit it— _ “I usually come here at night and run through things on my own, it—I never expect anybody else to be here.”

“I’ve almost been in for two hours, if you want me to le…” Remus stops himself, still in English, and chuckles once to himself with a distracted little toss of his head that Sirius commits to his most secure reaches of memory without meaning to. “Perdón, I forget to start with Spanish sometimes. It’s been a long day.”

Remus’ return to Sirius’ mother tongue is invigorating, and Sirius catalogues the other man’s posture with a quick scrape of his eyes. There’s certainly a tiredness in his shoulders, vague and light but there nonetheless, and Sirius’ mind is made up before he consciously construes a casual little shrug and steps up the low rise into studio three. “If it’s been a long day and this helps, just keep practicing with me. Only if you’re alright with that?”

The door creaks mildly as it swings shut again, and Sirius looks up from plopping down into a sit by the barre wall to see Remus grinning brightly at him from beside the stereo. “Guay.”

His heart flexes, a  _ friendly _ flex, and Sirius nods with his own smile as Remus flicks the Play button again and returns to the center of the room. “Bulerías?” Sirius asks over the track with a nod at the speakers while he tugs off his work boots, as though he hadn’t been fairly drooling as he watched through the door.

“Sí, you and Marlene do it so well and the desplante has been stuck in my head all week.” Remus speaks at Sirius through the mirror, setting his posture before he gives himself four clicks of intro and tosses off two flawless compáses of footwork along with the music. Sirius shakes his head with good-natured disbelief as he pulls on his old pair of purple suede botas. 

“You watch us run through it  _ twice _ and you already have it memorized, much less stuck in your head?”

Remus smirks at him and taps his temple with a cheeky crooked finger while Sirius rises to press a stretch into his lower back. “We talked about this the other day at Stela’s, remember? It’s all poetry to me. Too much gets stuck in this retentive mess of mine.”

They had been talking about Remus’ translation assignments and decidedly not flamenco, and yet Sirius hadn’t thought at the possibility of choreography being as easy to pick up as the shapes of a sonnet. Of course Remus has a new way of approaching things. Sirius does his best not to stare while he stretches and Remus continues running through bits of the desplante, doing it just as well as Sirius has ever performed it—not  _ better _ , per say, since their styles are quite different; or at least, that what Sirius’ ego tell itself. But it’s fantastic, and he’s found himself wrapped up in watching when Remus falls messily out of a quebrada and curses low to himself in colorful English. 

“Ah, that one tripped me up for weeks.” Sirius springs up out of his lunge and moves to stand beside Remus, taking a stance and pointing instinctively at his feet with a teacher’s clarity that takes over whenever he substitutes for Minerva’s classes. “That turn doesn’t go on the nine, it’s on the ‘y’ of eight so you can close by eleven on the left.” Sirius nods distractedly with the downbeat pulses of the rhythm and marks the first several steps before leading into the turn, pulling into it tightly, and snapping out the four crescendoed stamps that close the compás. He tosses off the muscle memory of the braceo that follows and leads into another footwork sequence as he looks over at Remus, and the other man is nodding steadily with comprehension and a brow furrowed.

“Again?”

“Vale.”

Sirius shows him again, twice in a row, and it’s so natural to trade advice and rhythm with Remus that he forgets to slam up any of the incessant iron walls inside him that he was so used to doing before their rehearsal duet seemed to cement them down for good. Remus gets the step within just a couple tries, and before Sirius knows it he’s asking after Remus’ own technique: strong standing heels, the way he pairs certain twists of his arms with the footwork, transitive moments in the desplante that have tripped Sirius up—both figuratively and literally—for months on end. They fall, easily and without quite meaning to, into a steady flow of paired practice.

Several times, Remus has to stop a fluent hammer of his feet to dash over and rewind the compás tape, and it’s in those moments that Sirius takes a secret second to look inward and catch his breath as he takes stock of his feelings. He feels lighter, happier; laughing more often than not and actually eager to be dancing instead of just obeying his pulse. The timbre of his feet racketing along with Remus is a shocking harmony, his darker thunder against the brighter flash of Remus’ lightning, and the shapes they make with either of their upper bodies are complementary without Sirius even adjusting his habits. It feels so natural, so necessary, that his cheeks almost hurt from smiling through the steady discovery of progress and collaboration. Sirius has hardly ever enjoyed practicing such fine-tuned practice, nonetheless to share it with somebody else. 

What the  _ fuck  _ is going on with him?

Nearly two hours pass before Sirius remembers that time hasn’t frozen, and he swears at the clock once he realizes it when the tapes runs itself out for the unpteenth time—“Pollas en vinagre, how the fuck is it eleven o’clock?!”

Remus laughs, exhausted and lank-limbed, and rewinds the compás tape again with a languid flip of his thumb. “You’ve impressive stamina, how long have you been dancing?”

Bodily ignoring the sweet curling at the roots of his lungs with the juxtaposition of a sweating Remus alongside the curving formant of  _ aguante _ sluicing out from his tongue, Sirius patently refuses to blush as he rakes his hair into a fresh tie at the crown of his head and huffs a satisfied sigh. “I started when I was 11, and I haven’t been able to make myself fucking stop since.”

Again, a blessing, Remus laughs. The tape rewind chucks to a stop and he ejects it before slipping it gently into its case and moving over to his back across the studio from Sirius’. “‘’Make yourself stop’?” He raises an eyebrow as he slips his glasses onto his face and pins Sirius with an expectant look. Sirius wills his heart to back down from his throat in a seizing, sudden moment. 

“It’s—you know.” He waves a vague hand in the air ahead of him, frowning, while he tugs off a boot with one hand. “Like Víbria, chewing at your heart. ‘Move, move, move, muchacho!’ No?” He grimaces with a spot of humor for the scratchy voice he lends the figurative dragon at his heels, and for the third time he’s granted the glory of hearing Remus laugh as he removes his own shoes. 

“Sort of, yeah.” A little smile stays put on Remus’ face, and Sirius takes quiet pride in that. They finish changing their shoes and pulling on their jackets, and Remus nods at the door as he zips up his bright green windbreaker. “Do you take the train home?”

“Ah, no. I live in Lavapiés, I just walk.”

Remus has paused at the door to match Sirius’ exit coming from further across the studio, a gesture so simple and yet so considerate that Sirius almost lets himself believe for a tick that he’s thinking of Remus in a shade just a bit sweeter than friendship.

Almost. 

“Suertoso,” Remus says as he flicks off the light switch and they leave the studio together. “All the better to calm your Víbria whenever you need it, isn’t it?”

Sirius takes his turn to laugh at that while they walk out. Side by side they’re down the darkened staircase, out to the street, and parting with short thanks and a wave in opposite directions. 

If Sirius feels a distant tugging behind his sternum, the faint pull of something urging him back toward Remus’ orbit like a weak magnetic pole, he ignores it with the same tilt of an awkward passing glance. 

—

“Who’s been in your bed lately, Sirius?”

Sirius trips over a turn and just barely catches himself through a stumble before crashing to his knees.  _ “What?!” _

He whips an incredulous stare at Minerva, who stands two strides away with an expectant and appraising eye on him as though she had just asked after his weekend plans instead of his sex life. “Whomever it is, or whatever you’re doing differently these days, keep at it. Your dancing has improved.”

“Joder, Minnie, you—”

“Language.”

“You’re the one who just asked whether or not I’m fucking, I could say the same to you!” Sirius glares at his director, supremely ruffled, and straightens the hem of his shirt with a fussy tug. “But thank you. I’ve been practicing.”

Minerva nods to herself and shrugs mildly, feline and calm. “It shows. I don’t know what you’ve been doing differently, but you should keep at it.”

She moves off to the other end of the studio, where Remus is marking slowly through a complicated letra of his seguiriyas along with James as he gets the music into his fingers. Sirius scuffs his toes aimlessly along the floor, annoyed, and mutters darkly to himself as he tries not to dwell on Minerva clearly getting exactly the rise out of him she’s been so good at hitting since he was a teenager. 

“Is she right?”

Sirius scowls up at Marlene, who’s snaked up behind the barre and slung over to lean on it as she snacks on a cut-up apple. “No.”

Marlene casts him a doubtful look and pokes her chin ever so slightly in the direction of Remus. “Is she  _ right?” _

“We’re  _ friends.” _ Sirius growl is feral, surprising, but Marlene snorts at him as though he were simply a teacup-sized Pomeranian.

“Sure. And Dorcas and I are ‘roommates.’”

“Hey, if your neighbors think so, might as well be the truth.” Sirius sets back to his footwork with a carved frown, but Marlene doesn’t get the message and rolls her eyes.

“Our walls are thin. They regularly hear her fuck me blind, I’m sure they can do basic arithmetic and figure it out.” She pelts Sirius with an appleseed when he drowns her out with a syncopated series of stamps, and Sirius swats it out of his hair before turning to glare at her shit-eating grin. 

“We’re just. Friends. No seas gilipollas, you harpy.”

“Whatever you say, brujo. Are you coming out for Alice’s birthday tonight?”

Sirius wants to say no, he truly does. But he likes Alice and the way she can tell a good dirty joke almost as well as Lily, so the temptation to see her with just a few too many drinks in her outweighs the constant confusion of white noise in his brain that makes him want to stay in. “Sure.”

“Bueno!” Marlene slides down and out from behind the barre and straightens her skirts, taking up her place beside Sirius without asking to mark through the bulerías again. “Your  _ friend  _ should be there too.”

There’s a quiver in Sirius’ heart that hints at something like excitement then, at the same time Pete gives a low  _ Ol _ _ é _ from the back of the studio as Remus snaps his fan open at some point in the seguiriyas. Sirius looks up in vague distraction and accidentally catches Remus’ eye just before that sharp green gaze is fluttered into obscurity behind the pattern of his fan. Sirius averts his stare as though he’s been burned and ignores the way Marlene smirks at him. He swallows and nods aimlessly, setting himself into his own stance for start of the castellano. “Bueno.”

Rehearsal closes later in the evening with an excited little jumble of farewells and promises that nearly everyone will see each other later for Alice’s celebration at Tres Escobas, a café too far away from Chueca to be worth Sirius’ time on his own but plenty fine for a fun evening with a few straight friends thrown in. Remus had asked, just before they parted at the intersection that takes Remus to the train and Sirius to the west street in a comfortable routine they’ve marked since that first evening of their nighttime practicing, if he should expect Sirius to be there; Sirius replied with a nod that might have been a bit too vigorous. Remus’ smile and usual farewell of  _ Guay _ had buoyed Sirius stupidly back toward home, in a way that Sirius is entirely glad Marlene hadn’t seen for comment. She would have surely laughed him into next month. 

_ Sólo somos amigos, _ Sirius thinks to himself for the hundredth time as he towels off his hair back home after a quick shower. He’s mostly succeeded in forcing himself to quit thinking of things in shades of green or purple or gold when he gets off now under the hot water, although the steady rhythm of seguiriyas encroaches every now and then. It had just now. Sirius writes it off as nothing but distraction. 

He settles for a blue shirt and high black trousers, accented with a thin brown leather belt to match the shoes he shines quickly before leaving. His hair is down and still damp, sure to dry on his walk to the café and also sure to end up knotted into a messy tie at some point in the night after the second or third glass of wine. Jacket on, keys and wallet pocketed, Sirius is off.

Escobas is quite full by the time he arrives—not pressing to the brim as it will be around eleven or twelve o’clock, but certainly full. They’ve live music and dancers on Sunday nights, and Sirius cares far less for that than he does the promise of time with his friends. He can put up with a background of lackluster dancing if it means enjoyable conversation and potentially, maybe if he’s lucky or someone up high has found favor with his fortune, some time to talk with Remus on their own.

_ Remus. _ Sirius almost loses his tongue when he sees Alice wave widely at him as he enters the café proper, for Remus looks up to find him with his eyes as well and smiles his greetings. He’s in a black shirt surely borrowed from some costume or another, a bit flamboyant for the venue although he wears it well for his confidence, and a pair of blue jeans that Sirius can already tell hugs his frame too perfectly to be fair.

Which is exactly the sort of thing that friends thing about one another, isn’t it?

Bueno.

“Cheers, reyna, you fucking made it!” James drapes over Sirius when he arrives at the table, and Sirius winces to smell James already what seems to be two or three shots deep.

“You drunken idiot,  _ you’re _ reyna.” Sirius corrects him with a pat over the man’s heart and leans sideways to kiss Alice on both her cheeks. “Feliz, guapita!”

“I’m so glad you could make it out!” Alice is beaming when Sirius draws back, and he finds her pretty teeth and impeccable lipstick infectious to spur him into his own smile. The dancing doesn’t start at Escobas until half past ten o’clock, but they’ve some nameless guitarist strumming along on the low stage to imbue the whole place with a sense of warmth. Despite his own compulsion for general solitude, Sirius finds that he doesn’t have to lie to himself to reply that he’s glad as well.

After fetching a deep pour of malbec from the bar, Sirius finds himself slotted between James and Frank with Remus on Frank’s other side. A distant part of him is grateful that Remus isn’t close, that he doesn’t have to feel the promise of Remus’ inherent warmth ebbing at the edges of his body from so near, but for what? He and Remus are friends; there wouldn’t be anything wrong with sitting on a barstool between two of his friends, one of whom is as good as blood and the other of whom is disastrously attractive in a very dangerous way.  _ Nothing wrong at all, _ he tells himself for the fourth time as he downs his second glass of wine in less than an hour.

Dorcas and Marlene arrive eventually along with Lily, fetched from her tour shift at the Felix Cervera and a bit overdressed because of it, and the company envelops them all easily. Just as Sirius had hoped, Lily and Alice go back forth in alternating spats of English and Spanish telling jokes that either have the table bursting with shocked laughter, or entirely expectant and disgusted but completely tickled laughter within no time flat. Soon Frank is standing up to get a round of tequila shots for those who rail for it—James, Alice, Marlene, and Peter—and Sirius is nearly four malbecs deep, and so he all but leaps through the roof when Remus’ laugh is suddenly a whole body length closer and his warmth is almost palpable from less than an inch away.

“How are you feeling then?” Remus leans closer to be heard over the din of the café, which has thickened without him noticing it in the time since Sirius first sat down, and nods at Sirius’ wine glass. Things seem augmented with Remus so close: the smell of the place, the sound of the crowd, the shoddy contour of the guitarist’s farruca onstage, the taste of wine tannins on Sirius’ tongue, the sweet-looking light behind Remus’ eyes. Sirius smiles despite himself, helped along by the wine, and leans an elbow on the table and a cheek on his fist.

“Perfectly perfect.” He articulates it with crisp exaggeration in English, which makes Remus laugh and makes Sirius’ insides flip nicely at the sound. “Y tu?”

“Dandy.” Remus gestures in a false cheers with his glass of something clear, perhaps vodka or perhaps water—it occurs to Sirius that he doesn’t know whether or not Remus even drinks, he’s Irish, is that a genetic requirement or not?—which Alice then misinterprets as a  _ full _ cheers and demands a speech from Remus.

“Come on, lobo!” She leans across the table with flushed cheeks and the giddy abandon of one only just poking at the cusp of 30 years, her inhibitions checked at the door with the last hours of the year behind her. “Speech!”

The table begins to chant  _ Dis-cur-so!  _ just as Frank returns with an artful fistful of shot glasses, and he joins in just as loudly as he sets the drinks down in front of the ones who asked for them. Remus shakes his head with an accommodating chuckle at the same time he tosses an enigmatic little look at Sirius, but before Sirius has any time to decipher it beyond the wine, Remus has his glass raised in a true toast.

“To Alice, the oldest  _ and wisest _ of all of us—” Remus holds out an open hand to fend off the offended squawk that comes from three of the women across the table before he raises an eyebrow at the lot of them and continues. “May we all embody your strength and grace as we move through life, especially on stage, and may we never botch a set of footwork with Minerva watching, ever again.”

The table bursts with pleased applause, giddy in celebratory agreement, and James reaches behind Sirius to slap Remus’ back approvingly while they all knock back a sip of whatever is in their glass. Another wave of applause suddenly surges up around the café, and the lot of them peer around for a moment before Sirius looks at the stage and groans. James laughs, and Remus looks subtly confused.

“Right place, wrong time,” James sings impishly, ribbing Sirius while Marlene rolls her eyes and lights a cigarette.

“Shut up.” Sirius kicks benignly at the leg of James’ stool and James snickers to himself, all vinegar with this much drink in him, and Lily is the only one with sense enough to lean over the table and bunt her head in the direction of the stage.

“Caradoc Dearborn,” she says just under the continued applause that covers the café; “One of Sirius’ least favorite people.”

“Ex fling, not even a boyfriend,” Dorcas adds as she drapes her arm comfortably around Marlene. Sirius glares daggers at her and wishes he was enough of an asshole to flick a splash of wine at her. Luckily, Remus only nods sagely.

“Is he a good dancer?”

Sirius snorts automatically, a scraping and ugly sound for the measure of alcohol in his system despite his relative sobriety, at the innocence in Remus’ question. “He relies on his face and fancy lot of turns. Not in the slightest.”

Remus is standing up before Sirius even catalogues what he’s doing, but then Remus’ hand is on his shoulder and he’s gesturing kindly at the door that leads up to the roof seating. He smiles gently, and Sirius suddenly wishes he had any talent for art besides dancing because  _ hostia puta _ that smile deserves a masterwork made after it. “Should we escape up for a smoke then?”

“Fucking yes.” Sirius gasps it in English to bring another one of those pleased little laughs from Remus, and he’s up and leading the way with his wine glass left on the table before anybody can volunteer themselves along with them. A small spark of territorialism flutters in Sirius’ veins on his way over and up the thin staircase. It isn’t until he’s breathing a dose of crisp outdoor air on the mostly-empty roof that he remembers he’s left his cigarettes at home.

“Here.” Leaning comfortably on one of the tables that looks out over a mild view of the city beneath them, Remus offers SIrius a cigarette as though it’s one of the most natural gestures he’s ever made. Sirius could kiss him in that moment; Sirius  _ should _ kiss him. At some point. One of these days. Maybe.

“You’re a saint.” Sirius takes the cigarette and is only slightly disappointed when Remus passes him the grey disposable lighter instead of lighting it from the end of his own— _ What did you expect, a fucking blowjob? _ Sirius ignored the sneer of his inner voice with a deep drag on the cigarette, and is pleasantly surprised to find that he and Remus smoke the same brand on his first exhale. The comfortable silence between them, however, feels just a bit too nice to break with something as trivial as blurting  _ Ducados! _ He lets it lie still, but Remus is the first to speak.

“I like coming out for things like this, but it can be...shit, what’s the word? A lot? Too much, the sort that makes you crazy?”

Sirius smiles through an exhale and looks expectantly at Remus for a moment before relenting. “Abrumador?”

_ “That’s _ it, thank you. My vocabulary falls apart after about nine o’clock.”

“We should do English then?” Sirius offers in Remus’ mother tongue, and there’s a little stutter of something too quick to catch in the way Remus meets his eyes at that before nodding.

“Yes, thank you.” He pauses to smoke for a moment, and Sirius tries not to meditate to closely out the corner of the eye at the way Remus’ cheeks hollow just a bit on his inhale. “So the one downstairs, he’s an arsehole?”

“He’s the worst of anything. Imagine a pile of shit, he’s the shit left over when the pile  _ rots.” _

“Fuck,” Remus interjects on a chuckle. “Did he cheat on you?”

It occurs to Sirius in a quick, passing thought that Remus is completely comfortable discussing the past of a gay relationship, perhaps Remus is gay? Is there a graceful way to ask that in English? Is there any way to ask that in Spanish without accidentally insulting him? It’s too complex to parse with this much wine in him, and so Sirius simply returns to the moment and shakes his head as he lets smoke curl out from his nostrils. “No, he insulted my dancing. He was jealous.”

He can still remember if he thinks back far enough, Caradoc shouting at Sirius in his living room about how Sirius wasn’t supporting him enough and spending too much time with his own self— _ Te importan estos putos zapatos m _ _ á _ _ s de lo que me importas _ —embodying the permanent dramatic pout on his face as he struck a match and singed the leather of Sirius’ favorite pair of shoes before Sirius could lunge forward and stop him.  _ What a fucking mess. _ He draws tightly on the cigarette, grateful for its tingle and the warm fact that it came from Remus, and doesn’t let himself reminisce any longer lest he go sour.

“What was there to insult? You’re a fantastic dancer.” Remus furrows his brow as he flicks away a small tail of ashes, down to the ground with a languid trip of his thumb as though flicking the Pause or Play button on the studio’s stereo. Sirius’ heart swells, just a bit.

“He was just being a bitch. He  _ is _ a bitch.” Sirius lets Remus laugh to himself again, enjoying the sound, before punctuating his pettiness; “His guitarist, Severus? He’s garbage as well.”

“Good to know.”

Sirius founders for a bit as they dip back into quietude, the muffled sounds of a sole á pulsing up through the floor from the interior below them. He has so many questions for Remus in this unsober, soft privacy between them, unbothered and alone, but he doesn’t know how to ask them. Luckily, Remus seems to be more confident with a dose of whatever he had been drinking in him and English on his tongue; when he smokes down to his filter and scrubs it out into the ashtray between them, he faces Sirius with an expectant and pleasant expression. “How did you find flamenco, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The endless possibilities of lies rise up in Sirius’ throat, all the things he’s told men who have taken him to bed after fiery performances or eager tourists wanting to hear just a bit more of Spanish fantasy —his mother was a dancer but she lost a leg and Sirius was determined to carry on her legacy; his best friend, James, that fantastic guitarist, is so talented but tragically deaf, and he can only play when he feels the vibrations of Sirius’ feet on the floor; Sirius wanted to be a ballet dancer, but his body shape wasn’t right for it as a child and so he fell in love with flamenco instead—fucking lies. Remus doesn’t deserve lies, not with that honesty radiating out from those lovely eyes and the willingness to seek a bit of stillness outside the rowdiness of a Sunday night. Sirius swallows his pride and sighs.

“We have school here in Spain called ESO. I don’t know really what it’s all like in Ireland, but it starts at 12 or 13 years and goes through 16 years. It prepares you for Bachillerato, two years before university, but you don’t have to go to that one. Only ESO.” Sirius reaches for his drink before he remembers it’s downstairs, but Remus produces his from the end of the table and holds it out for him. Sirius braces himself for a sharp bite of alcohol, but he’s met instead with water. It’s a calm sort of surprise, but not really surprising at the back of his mind. He sips and steels himself instead with his own inner gumption. “Thanks. Anyway, I, ah. I did badly in my third and fourth years, and I stopped before finishing. My family was...not so good, and I didn’t want to stay at home, so I left and lived on my own and quit going to school. All I had with my own money was two pairs of botas, so I could only dance to keep myself sane. And from there, I just sort of...found what came next. Arthur’s garage, Stela’s shop, and the rest is just life.”

Remus nods with a calm smile, unjudging and serene and Sirius could, again, kiss him for it. The thought is certainly less than undesirable. Sirius doesn’t want to explain any further about his cankerous family, the rot of their politics, the leftovers of Franco he can still smell sometimes in his genetics like decaying meat, but Remus doesn’t press for any of it. “I like that way of thinking of it,” he hums, pulling out another pair of cigarettes, “‘The rest is just life.’ Makes everything seems a bit more manageable.”

It probably means something that he lights Sirius’ second cigarette now from the end of his own. Probably. Sirius doesn’t give himself the luxury of ruminating on it. “And how about you, Se ñor Irish? I can’t think there’s much flamenco in Dublin.”

“I’m from Galway,” Remus says with a laugh, “and no, there isn’t. But my father is three-quarters Spanish and made me take lessons, I hated them until I was ten.”

“When did you start?”

“Four years old.”

“Carajo, that’s ridiculous.”

“What? He wanted me to be in touch with my roots!”

“Not the dancing, I’m thinking about the shoes! Your shoes much have been so small!”

Remus cracks with true laughter, his eyes shut and crimping at the edges, and Sirius suddenly wants to hold his hand.  _ Coño.  _ Friends didn’t hold each others’ hands. Or fight back the compulsion to kiss one another. Or stare for this long. Sirius averts his eyes to the glimmer of the city beyond and draws on a slow drag of smoke to avoid the thought as his heart pounds a bit too fast for comfort.

“Yes, the shoes were very small,” Remus relents. “But I really do love it. It’s like I have to do it, you know? If I don’t, I liable to go crazy.” He looks at his fingers for moment, looking very thoughtful and internal, and Sirius is almost about to say he knows the feeling on a much darker level before Remus looks up at him with sudden conviction. “I really want to be a choreographer.”

The determination in that look is stunning, and Sirius can only nod as he accidentally slips back into Spanish; “You absolutely should, you’re incredible.”

A faint tint of pink just barely springs up beneath Remus’ cheeks, but he looks back down at his hands and draws on his cigarette again with a tight little laugh before Sirius can truly grasp at the sight of it. “I’m at university because I think it’s what’s relevant,” he says, almost to himself it’s such a murmur. “Lorca is important and —and  _ relevant, _ flamenco is something so different, I just don’t know how I could.”

“Fuck that.” Sirius speaks before he means to and Remus looks up at him sharply, not accusatory but with a hint of impressed surprise in the rise of his brow. “Fuck that, have you  _ seen _ yourself dance? It’s the most relevant thing I’ve ever seen!”

Remus breaks into a careful smile and sniffs a laugh, and he runs his tongue along his bottom lip while Sirius pretends to ignore the glimmering pink of it. “You think so?”

“You got the desplante into my system, no? Minnie has been trying to do that for  _ years.” _ Sirius exaggerates his dramatics with a pull of his face and bared hands on either side of it, and Remus laughs again, freer, open-mouthed and showing teeth and shining, as they settle in to while away the rest of the night up here in the comfort of their seclusion—so brightly that it almost makes Sirius quit feeling the pound of his heart pulling so madly at his chest.

Almost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for reading, I'm really glad with the way this plot is turning out as I put it to words :>  
> Three more chapters left, stay tuned!


	6. Desplante

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pre-show, pre-shock, pre-shattering of everything Sirius was prepared to feel at once; there should be a warning for these sorts of things in life, no?
> 
> [The folk song James is singing in the dressing room:
> 
>  _On a cool evening in May_  
>  I took my horse and went for a ride  
> In the highest mountains  
> Where my brunette used to pass... 
> 
>  _...And I told her, pretty gardener,_  
>  Would you give me a rose?  
> Would you give me a carnation? _]_

_"Donde hay humo, hay calor."_

—Spanish proverb

_—_

Malasaña—if Sirius could choose one barrio to encapsulate all the worthy parts of Madrid, it would be Malasaña.

He rounds the top step of the Tribunal station exit, rucksack stuffed unceremoniously with three different garment bags and as many pairs of shoes, and can’t help but smile to himself. Pedestrians, scooters, and bicycles are winnowing down the streets that spool out around the neighborhood, their noisy patter making a comfortable foil to the pre-show butterflies rattling in Sirius’ heart. Minerva set their call time at 6:00 for an 8:00 curtain, and Sirius has made sure to give himself enough time to walk to the theatre the long way around the streets and absorb the bustle around him while still arriving on time.

Stage fright has never been much of an issue for Sirius. As he passes a bustling café and the loud patter of Real Madrid fans shouting at a match broadcast, Sirius thinks back with a reaching string of errant thought into his childhood—twelve years old, full of aimless familial bitterness he wouldn’t find the bottom of and extricate completely until he was 19, he had been standing backstage beside Minerva at his first recital peeking through the curtain out over the small crowd. _They aren’t here,_ he had eventually realized. No proud parents to come watch their eldest son perform. He wondered for some time after then if it was because his father could already tell he was a maricón, or if his mother had a grudge against him for embracing an art her own parents never let her explore because it was too gitano for a Spaniard so pure she could easily trace her lineage back to La Inquisición.

Either way, from then on Sirius has known the only person who will reliably and unflaggingly witness his performances, contra viento y marea, is himself. It’s a staggeringly freeing concept. His hands don’t even shake anymore when he takes the stage.

With the last of a scone in his hand from a shop just across the street from the theatre, Sirius arrives at the little hovel of a theatre and shoulders his way through the stage door. He whirls in with all the flair and aplomb of one putting a show for himself and himself only, vaults over the shallow dip on the stair railing, scone held up and out of harm’s way—and almost collides with somebody exiting the back entrance to the dressing room.

“Hola!”

Sirius coughs on almond crumbs and staggers to a standstill, barely cataloguing the red warmup top and jogger pants paired with familiar wire-rimmed glasses before he can collect himself. Remus has a hand out to steady him, his tattooed hand, and Sirius nearly leaps from his skin with the contact he can feel like a firebrand even through the leather arm of his jacket. Remus chuckles. Sirius wants to chug bleach.

“Hola, are we the only ones here?” Sirius forces a bright smile to his face and succeeds in not sliding to pieces when Remus pulls his hand back and into his pocket. They’ve been practicing anything and everything together on Monday and Wednesday nights, sometimes three times a week when Remus doesn’t have much coursework and can squeeze in a Thursday. Soleá, bulerías, seguiriyas, fandangos, tangos, farruca—all of it and more. Sirius hasn’t been so hungry to learn since he had perfected his turns several long years ago. He doesn’t know why Remus has sparked such an intense burn in his guts, a fucking inferno, an absolute starvation for flamenco and the easy smiles he can pull from Remus...but he does, doesn’t he? Friendship. They’re _friends._

Remus points over his shoulder at the double doors shut behind him, flaking layers of decades of paint and battered handles standing guard to that anteroom of creation, and shakes his head. “Minerva and Albus are here, and Peter just arrived with Dorcas and Marlene. And I think Amelia was first, she’s almost completely dressed already.”

“Sí, she lives just up the street from here.” Sirius thumbs the rest of the scone into his mouth as he nods, speaking around his food, grateful for the awkwardness of talking with his mouth full after his stomach wrenched with the combined relief and fury that he and Remus don’t have the theatre to themselves.

“She’s lucky. I think this would be such a cool neighborhood to live in, no?” Remus pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and smiles, whether at Sirius’ ungraceful eating habits or otherwise it’s impossible to tell.

“Ah, the Movida crowd would keep you awake all hours. ‘Esta noche todo el mundo a la calle,’” Sirius quotes loftily as he ignores the way his heart is beating with the angle of Remus’ eyes on him. “I never would have tagged you as that sort of tipo, are you hiding all your own revolutionary poetry from me?”

Remus laughs, and Sirius rakes his hair up into a complicated twist to keep from chewing off his fingers with anxious adoration. _Friends, friends, we’re only friends._ “Not quite as much as most of my colleagues at the university. Though I think I could start some pretty fantastic fires about Thatcher at some of these cafés, don’t you think?”

It’s Sirius’ turn to laugh then, and his traitorous heart almost makes him lean forward into Remus’ shoulder. It’s the sort of move he’s pulled before out late at the discos in Chueca or even further up the street here in Malasaña, the wordless communique that says _Llévame hogar, guapo._ But he stops himself. _Friends._ And besides, there’s a fucking show to put on; no sense wasting his energy casting lines for a man who could, for all Sirius knows, be straighter than an arrow. A certain curling in Sirius’ instincts knows that isn’t true, but he ignores it nonetheless.

Remus doesn’t seem to blink at the way Sirius stiffly pulls a sideways stretch instead of closing the distance between them, but the rest of Sirius’ pride is rescued by somebody else pushing their way through the stage door to bellow in heavily-exaggerated English, _“SHOWTIME!”_

“Hola,” Lily’s voice follows immediately. Sirius looks up to see James loping down the steps with his guitar case in one hand and his eyes flicking subtly between Sirius and Remus. _Pues,_ the look seems to say, tipping up that maddening corner of James’ smirk. Sirius doesn’t do him the service of glaring.

“Ready to lance some people right through the heart with our marvelous artistry?” James leaves Sirius with one last cutting glance, brotherly demand to know _Que mierda_ sometime soon, before dramatically pantomiming the shape of a lanza stabbing him through the back. Once again Remus is too kind and gifts him a laugh that Sirius can see puffing James’ pride up even while he turns to accept a kiss on the cheek from Lily.

“Are you feeling good?” She pats Sirius twice on the chest with a brisk grin. Sirius fakes it right back at her.

“Feeling perfect, we’ll be wonderful,” he lies as easily as air. He holds himself back from glancing at Remus as he and James move into the dressing room, but Lily catches the arrested shudder of his eyes— _carajo_. She waits until the door clatters shut again before holding Sirius in his place by his jacket sleeve when he starts to follow them.

“Bullshit,” she says in muttered English. “What’s the matter?”

Sirius shrugs her hand off but avoids her stare, brooding with a glower at the ground, always feeling very small under Lily’s observation. “Fine, I’m nervous. Just a bit.”

“About what?”

“Dancing!”

Lily shifts a folder of sheet music under one arm and frowns. “And what else? Sirius Black wouldn’t blink twice about dancing in front of Juan Carlos himself.”

Sirius hisses as he feels bristles begin poking at his insides like arrowheads. “What is this, the fucking Santo Tribunal?”

Lily’s eyebrows shoot up her forehead and she raises her free palm in defense. “Get ahold of yourself, perrito, I’m just trying to help.”

Exhaling slow and low through his nose, Sirius stills himself for a moment with his eyes shut. _Friends._ “Thank you. But I’m _fine.”_

Lily purses her lips and narrows her eyes slightly as though she’s about to ask more questions, but she nods to herself. “Talk to me if you need it though, won’t you?”

“Always do.” Sirius flashes her a broad grin, bravado resumed, and hopes the chips he feels digging into that armor don’t go half as deep as they seem from the deeper pits of his heart. He barrels into the dressing room, all purpose, and sets to preparing for the stage.

The hum of eagerness backstage has long been Sirius’ favorite part of performing. The quick cadence of banter interwoven with soft footwork as the dancers dress and stretch and warm up, makeup half-done or hair only part way pinned; the rustle of costumes and the hiss of travel steamers as the ladies unwrinkle skirts and mantónes and the men press creases back into their trousers or jackets; the clatter of combs, makeup brushes, bobby pins, zippers and compacts. Sirius lets it sink into him, hug around his spirit with a fierce embrace, and tries to stop glancing over at Remus’ back sat across the wide and narrow room at his own mirror. Sirius had sequestered himself in the stage wings, dodging the technicians and focusing on exercising his ankles, when he saw Remus move to pull off his warmups and change into his seguiriyas costume there in the middle of the dressing room—his surprising lack of shame should really be no surprise at all, but Sirius had still panicked. The threat of seeing Remus Lupin bare in any way strikes eager terror in Sirius’ heart, and thankfully he’s fully dressed by the time Sirius returns to his station feeling sufficiently distracted by testing the floor.

Scowling as he rolls the tip of his eyeliner along one of his vanity lights, traced by ancient smears of countless performers doing the same to warm the tip, Sirius breathes hot air on the well-worn pencil for good measure before putting it to his lower lashes with a careful hand.

“Brujo!”

Sirius jumps and just barely avoids putting out his eye when James claps him on the back. He thumbs at Sirius’ trouser suspender there, snapping it benignly against Sirius’ shoulder, and gives him a bright grin in the mirror before mocking a big kissing sound with sloppy fish lips. “Getting dolly for the audience?”

“I think you could do to cherry up those lips yourself, reyna, how does that sound?” Sirius turns to pinch at James’ cheeks as James flinches away, swatting at his touch with the hand not holding his guitar alongside a snorting laugh.

“I’ll ask Lily to do that for me after the show, no?” James winks and easily places a foot up on the chair behind Sirius. He settles his guitar on his knee and strums into an oozy-sweet melody, effortless as anything, looking pointedly at Sirius. “You look distressed.”

Sirius rolls his eyes and sets back to his makeup. “Yes, because you’re making me listen to your mistress wail as you fondle her.”

 _“Una tarde fresquita de mayo/_ _Cogí mi caballo y me fui a pasear/Por las sierras más altas que había/Donde mi morena solía pasear…”_ James ignores him and raises his voice in dramatic song, raising his eyebrows at Sirius in the mirror and not-so-subtly poking his head in Remus’ direction.

“Cállate, cretino.” Sirius moves to his other eye as he hisses at James, kicking out with one heel to jab at his shin. James only laughs as he continues plucking through the little folk song.

“It’s what you want from him though, isn’t it?” He says in a low voice, before skipping ahead to the chorus of the song back at his annunciatory volume to sing; _“Y le dije, jardinera hermosa/¿Me das una rosa, me das un clavel?”_

Dorcas tosses out an _Olé, guapito_ from her place on the floor stretching out her hips. James beams and wiggles his eyebrows at Sirius, expectant as he was to find him across from Remus in the stairwell. “Pues,” he murmurs, and he doesn’t have to nod at Remus again to make his intent clear. Sirius shoves the cap back onto his eye pencil and tosses it into his stage bag, stifling a growl in his chest as he zips the bag shut.

“No. Sólo somos amigos.” His voice is tight, picado, sharp as tweezer edges as he spits out the words that feel as useless as a desperate plea to la Virgen these days. James’ eyes flash behind his glasses and his mouth twitches.

“What do you have to lose?” Blessedly, James keeps his own voice low as well beneath the noodling along his strings, the tune of _Tarde Fresquita_ covering them like a privacy screen.

Sirius clenches his jaw and turns sharply to face James. “My fucking _nerve.”_

“In my expert opinion, you’re plenty nervous already. I haven’t seen you frowning like this since you had to show up at Biennial with a bad haircut.” James stops strumming and tugs on the tail of Sirius’ half-ponytail for accent. Sirius swats at him again and stares back at himself in the mirror, doing a once-over of everything he’ll need to be stage-ready for curtain in twenty minutes.

“I appreciate your concern but I’ve told you, Jaime, I don’t need any fucking dating advice from you. Vale?” Sirius’ words are sharp, but the rare and gentle care of his old nickname for James softens their hit. James smiles at him and shakes his head.

“You’re a disaster, do you know this?”

Sirius is about to scoff again and ask James what the hell does he know that Sirius doesn’t to spark this impish idiocy, but a sudden thump and shout from onstage shatters the moment like a stone on water. Everyone turns to the stage entrance, liebres on alert, and Dorcas is the first to stumble out of her un-buckled shoes and bound, barefoot, into the wings. “Marlene?!”

Sirius’ heart leaps into his throat as he follows.

The rest of the company clutters out to the stage as it becomes evident something is wrong when Marlene continues to curse in loud, colorful Spanish shot through with choice bits of Arabic and some English for good measure. Sirius rounds the scrim and sees her sitting in the pile of her skirts, face screwed up in pain, leaning against Dorcas crouched behind her. She’s cradling her ankle in both hands. Sirius’ stomach drops.

“Que pasó, donde est— _ay, Madonna.”_ Minerva presses her lips together and touches the heel of her hand to her forehead in disbelief when she makes her way to the head of the company’s clutter. “What happened?”

“I was testing the floor and I messed up, I rolled it, I fell and made it worse,” Marlene bawls. To her credit, her tears aren’t pitied or dramatic but merely furious. She swipes at her right eye with the back of one wrist, hissing in pain when she twitches her ankle in testing motion. Sirius’ heart tugs with pained sympathy as Dorcas shushes her gently and wipes carefully at her other cheek.

“It’s okay, amor,” Dorcas murmurs. Marlene shakes her head, one curl bouncing sharply out of her tight bun, and catching on the corner of her mouth.

“No, it’s not! I’ve fucked the show. I can’t dance tonight Minnie, I’m so sorry.”

Minerva clenches her teeth, jaw flexing, and looks pointedly at the floor with a deep breath making her frame swell and deflate slightly in slow deliberation. “It’s okay, Malena, don’t worry.” She looks up at Sirius and he feels very suddenly like a dog looking down a hunter’s barrel—a very piteous hunter. “We’ll have to substitute someone in for the tientos and cut the bulerías, unless you can do the whole thing solo?”

“Fuck no,” Sirius blurts before scrambling to cover himself when Marlene fails to hold back a distressed sound of disappointment; “I—yes, of course, we sub the tientos, or Dorcas and I can just do that one together, but I can’t do that soleá on my own. There’s no way.”

Sighing heavily again and smoothing her hand over the tight twist at the nape of her neck, MInerva nods. “Xeno, you have the tientos, no?”

Xenophilius nods from beside James, standing next to Sirius with a worried frown and still clutching his guitar. “I could do it, sure.”

“Gracias, pavo.” Marlene offers a watery smile as she slides her shoe off with a wince. Sirius’ gut clenches to see her ankle flowering with a dark red, angry and mottled, surely twisted. Xeno returns a sympathetic little twitch of his mouth, hand to his heart, and bows his head gently at her.

“Let me do the soleá.”

Sirius is glad his mouth is shut, for his stomach would surely have rocketed out onto the floor in a shocked splatter when he hears Remus pipe up from behind him. He steps aside as though Remus might burn him when he feels the man pushing gently to the front of the company’s worried huddle, and Minerva’s eyebrows go up.

“Do you know it?” She doesn’t ask with ire or derision but genuine surprise, and Remus isn’t sheepish about it in the slightest.

“I’ve been able to pick up at least the majority of most of the dances over the last few weeks,” he says briskly, and in the back corner of his mind not vaguely panicking Sirius catalogues the fact that he quite enjoys the sight of Remus in torero trousers and a shirt without a jacket. “I can improvise what little of it I’m not entirely solid on, unless you take issue with that?”

Anybody else asking the question would likely come across as accidentally snide, but either the moment is too harried already or Remus is truly that genuine to everyone’s sensibilities and not only Sirius’ hapless star-eyes. Minerva nods after a moment and waves a hand. “It’s alright with me, the audience might be surprised but it’s Malasaña. They’ll live. Sirius?”

It takes an extra moment for Sirius to register that almost everyone’s eyes are on him then, and his throat is dry. “Sure, it—not as though I have a choice, right?”

He colors it with a tight little laugh, but the humor he means for it clearly doesn’t come across as he had intended. Remus’ eyes flash behind his glasses and a small frown takes harbor on his lips, and Sirius wants to scramble to correct himself but misses the chance when Minerva assents.

“Bueno, then for the alegrías we only need to adjust places a bit.” She looks at the slim silver watch on her wrist and says something to herself under her breath. “Fifteen minutes until curtain, let’s get back to preparing please! James, fetch ice.”

James is off like a shot and Lily kneels at Marlene’s other side while the rest of the company mills back into the dressing room. Sirius feels himself begin to unspool on the inside. _Hostia puta,_ leave it to him to put his fucking foot in his mouth less than half an hour before he goes on stage. He does not need this. He does _not fucking need this._ He turns on his heel and barrels back to his dressing station before he can do anything else that makes him want to curl up and rot.

Sirius succeeds in distracting his racing heart for a grand total of five minutes before his palms itch to do something about it. He’s going to have to dance a duet alongside someone he’s never rehearsed the full number with before, notwithstanding someone who makes his heart do horrible spirals in his chest whenever they’re less than a foot apart in the studio and almost touching and—Sirius digs his fingers into the edge of the vanity table and only just refrains from shouting _Only friends!_ aloud at the stark white noise of his thoughts. He glances up over his shoulder and sees Remus there at his corner station, back turned, and catches the small frown still clouding his face in the reverse reflection in his own mirror. The sight pulls sharply at Sirius’ inner ramparts, and he’s up and walking over before he can stop himself.

Remus doesn’t look up when Sirius arrives to stand beside him, working on what Sirius can now see is reinforcing the stitching on a jacket tassel with a small sewing kit lying open on Remus’ station. Sirius swallows around thought for a moment and doesn’t overlook the way Remus is watching him from the corner of his eyes. “We’ve never rehearsed the whole thing together,” he says unevenly. _Fucking words,_ he can never make them do what he needs them to. “I mean that we haven’t—”

“It will be fine.” Remus has never snapped at him before and while his voice isn’t entirely sharpened, there’s a jagged edge to it now that Sirius senses like a scent of piquant brightness. “Like I said, I can improvise what I might miss. All you need to do is dance as you would normally.”

“I know, but that’s—it’s—” Sirius sputters around his thoughts, and it gets worse when Remus looks up at him with his eyebrows raised in challenging expectation. His neckerchief glimmers with its striations of gold to match those lovely fucking shoes of his, and Sirius feels his face growing how. “How do I dance normally when there’s nothing _normal_ about this at all? Two men?”

If he had thought Remus seemed upset earlier, it doesn’t compare to the shadow that shudders to life behind Remus’ glare at that. He stands, just slightly taller than Sirius with the heels of his shoes, and sets his jacket down slowly on the back of his chair. “And what the hell do you mean by that?”

Sirius works his jaw around terrified tension for a moment when he realizes his fluster has shoved all of his humor out the door. “Nothing! I misspoke, I—”

“We’re speaking your language Sirius, it shouldn’t be too difficult.” Remus’ mouth, Sirius realizes in frantic observance, looks positively feral pulled into a snarl like that. There isn’t any coraje here, no put-on gravity; he’s angry. And it’s Sirius’ fault.

“Then maybe we try English,” he hisses quickly in the uneven spikes of Remus’ nativity, breath coming fast, heart hammering at his ribs as Molly calls out the five-minute warning until curtain. “Why didn’t you let Minnie just cut the dance? I have the tientos, I don’t need to be onstage so much that we keep it.”

Remus’ eyes flash, all gold with the play of the teal and black and gold in his costume, and his anger seems to soften just enough to invite explanation. “You’ve worked hard on it. It should see the stage. But if you don’t want to dance with a man, then I su—”

“It’s not because you’re a man!” Sirius all but cries, back to Spanish with the immediacy of his need to explain himself. He doesn’t know why he’s getting so worked up, tangled, looped in and around himself like the thread Remus has been working into his jacket, but he doesn’t have time to examine that. “I just don’t want you to do it because you think you have to, I don’t need charity—”

“You think this is _charity?”_ The anger is back on Remus’ face, tinged with disbelief, and Sirius’ spirit twists violently when it’s clear he’s doubled back and done even more damage to the moment. The vanity lights feel too hot, this low yellow glow of the light in here too oppressive; “You think I would rehearse with you like that because I _pitied_ you?”

“No!”

“Then what? You don’t want to share the stage with me for some reason?” Remus sits back down with a less-than-subtle scrape of his chair and sets back to his jacket with quick fingers that Sirius notices are trembling ever so slightly. “I can stomach that, it’s happened before, just tell me now so I don’t make this same mistake in the future.”

“Remus, _que mierda,_ it’s not like that!” Sirius ignores the old hurt shuddering in Remus’ voice at that, the barest tremolo there beneath the layers of preshow jitters, and forges forward; “I’m happy to do the dance with you—”

“Are you though?”

 _“—but_ I want to make sure you want to do it. Don’t be a martyr, there’s too much of that tonterías in flamenco already, no?”

Sirius feels as though he’s pirouetting on the edge of a knife while he searches Remus’ face in the mirror for some in to his thoughts, and he gets at least the consolation of the slightest softening at the corners of Remus’ eyes. Remus pauses the tug of his needle through his jacket and opens his mouth, drawing breath—

 _“_ _Posiciónes!”_

The stage manager’s voice carries through the dressing room and Remus’ mouth shuts again. Sirius quells the trembling urge to shout, namely at the diminutive woman with the folder bursting with papers currently ducking back into the wings, and stays rooted to his spot. It’s another moment before Remus looks up at him, expression visibly schooled. “You should get backstage, right? The tientos is first.”

“First you have to tell me you _want_ to share the soleá por bulerías ,” Sirius says all in a rush. It’s selfish, this compulsion to get confirmation that Remus might truly crave to share the stage with him, crave _him,_ it’s absolutely stupid and reckless and yet Sirius can’t push down the longing for it. He holds Remus’ eyes for a second longer than he normally would with anyone else before Remus’ lips quirk up slightly at one edge.

“I’ll see you onstage. Guay?”

Heat rises in Sirius’ cheeks, wild a quick with a rushing roar in his ears, and the only thing he hears beyond his own pulse then is Dorcas calling his name from the stage entrance— _”Venga, Sirius, get out here!”_

Sirius nods, walking backward for a few steps so as not to lose the arresting image of Remus looking at him expectantly. “Guay.”

He turns, through the heavy black curtain and into the invigorating pitch black of a waiting stage, y por lo tanto the show begins.

—

Waiting in the wings, Sirius is more drummed up at the middle of the show that he had been at the outset.

The tientos went well. Sirius had been keyed up by his enigmatic exchange with Remus, filled up with equal parts residual anger and confused excitement, and his footwork had been grand for it. Fast, accurate, with depth and intensity that Dorcas and Xeno matched well, and the audience had gone wild for it. The small theatre is packed, the sea of faces swimming in anonymity beyond the stage lights and rife with approval and jaleo, and Sirius is enjoying the good energy they’ve brought with them.

But a different sort of energy has taken root in Sirius’ marrow as the show has progressed, something that feels dangerously close to infatuation but isn’t worth examining right now. It’s doing too many good things to Sirius’ dancing to sully it now by picking it apart.

Sirius had changed into his all-black costume with the bright red pañuelo around his waist and matching lucky shoes, shined last night with red polish to cover as many scuffs as possible, as Remus had danced his seguiriyas onstage. If he listened closely to the rhythm seeping in through the stage entrance, tight and sharp and explosive as ever, Sirius found he could dredge up thoughts of that first café performance with effortless redolence. It had made him smile and filled his veins with something warm and pleasant, and while Sirius is sure James or Marlene would pick him to bits if they could see him staring off all glazed into the middle distance, he doesn’t mind. Besides, both of those desviados are otherwise occupied; James currently accompanying Frank and Alice’s guajíras with wild fervor alongside Benjy, and Marlene in a chair on the opposite side of the wings with her ankle propped up and speaking intently to Remus.

Remus has changed out his shoes and jacket for a silk shirt fraught with polka dots and dashing black patent botas, still in his same trousers but somehow looking more malleable, softer in this costume than he had in the sharp velvet getup for seguiriyas. Sirius almost puts the thought from his head before he suddenly decides to fuck it—well and truly _Fuck it,_ he’s already this far in, isn’t he? He’s about to share a shockingly intimate dance with the man he’s been having trouble chasing out of his system for nearly three full months now, why shouldn’t he have his chance to stare? His pulse is already high, his muscles are already more than a bit worked and traced with sweat, why _shouldn’t_ he indulge a bit and let himself daydream?

The answer to that is, of course, that Sirius is about to share a shockingly intimate dance with the man he’s been having trouble chasing out of his system.

He decides that Remus Lupin is very like an enchanting series of footwork: once it’s gotten into your body, it will not let go.

Before he knows it, after an anonymous stretch of time—that strange shift of physics that every foray into the theatre causes, a bending of reality in which nothing is grounded by the laws of normal progression for the length of a performance—encompassing the rest of the guajíras and a solo cante from Lily, the lights are dimming for the start of the soleá. Sirius’ throat constricts, manic and heady, sweet, and he wishes very suddenly that he could see more across the wings than just Remus’ silhouette.

James and Peter start the music on Benjy’s cue, dry strumming and bare rhythm. The scrim fades up into a deep red to cast them all in shadow, and as though carried aloft in a wave, Sirius is moving onstage and guided by nothing but purpose.

_“Te fuiste Iberao…”_

This music Sirius’ favorite out of the whole program. Angular and smoky, Benjy and Albus will share the verses as though narrating the inner drive of each dancer. Marlene has always found it funny that Albus sings her verses, his voice roughed beautifully with age and experience and in a sharper tone than Benjy’s rounded timbre, and yet Sirius can’t find it in him to worry about how things will go when Remus takes over the spot that should be Marlene’s across from him once Benjy finishes his letra. Sirius moves his body through the introduction, every pose and shift intent and driven, and he comes out of his last turn before Remus enters ready to receive what the universe is going to serve him. For once, Sirius is not afraid of his heart’s anticipations.

_“Cerraba puerta; ay, cerró…”_

Remus enters in several tight turns alongside Albus’ voice, the dim red light catching on his shirt to make him look like some sort of whirling spirit, and he comes out of it into expert marking steps to bring him ever closer to Sirius while still keeping the space of entry between them. The way the dance moves, they won’t draw close until almost two-thirds of the way through. Marlene always likes to joke it’s like an arguing couple, shouting with their feet instead of words, angry at something stupid the other has done before they make up and “Fuck it away with more wild choreography;” her words, not Sirius’.

Sirius can only hope his nerve lasts long enough to see him through every inch of footwork until then.

The first several letras are call and response, steady and resolute and almost militant, Sirius and Remus trading their marking and footwork like bold opinions as the lights fade up to bathe them in the gold of buttery source bulbs. The audience offers encouragement along with the musicians, James’ voice bordering on jeering as his jaleo always does while he spins magic with his guitar, and Sirius finds himself surrendering to it more freely than he had ever thought possible. Thankfully, blessedly, Remus is meeting his eyes and looks to be clear of any lingering fury—at least the sort of the fury that isn’t manufactured for his onstage bravado.

Like a battle, they trade their rhythms as though Remus has belonged to this dance since its nascience. Sirius’ footwork is rapid iron, ringing and heavy as a mazo, while Remus’ hits like the sharp hit of bastón demanding attention. And demand attention he does; as he helps build the peaks and valleys of their dance, Remus pulls Sirius deeper and deeper into his orbit. By the time they share their first burst of doubled footwork, Sirius is in thrall. _Sólo somos amigos_ suddenly feels extremely pale, a lacking phrase for this incredible reaching perfection plaguing Sirius with precisely the sort of intensity that he would never want to cure as long as he lives.

_“De la alba buena como cabía…”_

Sirius wants to sew his very existence to the moment in which he and Remus both snap tight turns, arms up, and Remus places himself against Sirius’ body as though he belongs there when the music slows for just a short while. Sirius has rehearsed and performed this time and time again with Marlene but never before has it been this warm, this intense, this connected to his heartbeat with the way he and Remus are crossing the stage as one body—all feels forgiven, all of their strange disagreement and flaring passion in the dressing room gone, replaced by the solidity of them sharing the same movement. When they split to break into more explosive footwork, Sirius almost regrets it. But it means he gets to trade more effortless energy with the other man through the soles of his shoes, so he can hardly lament it very badly.

He gives a sharp llamada and invites the approval of the musicians as they follow him, James assuring him “Iré tomar allí!” as Sirius can’t help but grin into the complex weave of his footwork. He’s feeling it again, and he’s helpless to it; _duende._

Sirius’ feet skate along the stage and he doesn’t trip up once. The indomitable speed of his heels, the perfect burn in his thighs, he lives in the moment in a way he hardly ever has before. He plays delectably with the rhythm, and when he tosses the lead of it to Remus the other man catches it without a single misstep. Remus rockets into the same flow of the rhythm while lending it his own flair, feet flashing, the audience shouting approval and James going so far as to call out a lofty _“Alé, la casabe!”_ when Remus adds a bit more of his hips into his body language.

Were he not so absolutely wrapped up in the dance, Sirius would aim a well-placed kick at James’ chair.

The dance continues, mostly improvisatory at this point but Sirius doesn’t care; nobody seems to care, simply flying along with the rhythms Sirius and Remus are weaving with their feet and palms and the flats of their chests and legs. When Benjy’s secondary guitar enters again with a calm melody, always reminiscent to Sirius of the fresh and rolling hills beyond the city, Sirius finds himself smiling. When Remus turns to him before pressing back up against him again to perform another flawless letra of doubled footwork, he’s got a fierce grin as well. Their wrists twist in tandem as though weaving their names in the air, and Sirius can imagine no greater contentment than this.

Before he’s truly ready for it, the last battery of energetic footwork is rolling. He and Remus pull out all the stops, even reaching a point at which their nearly laughing at one another as they see what the other can do with the patterns passed between them. _This is freedom,_ Sirius thinks wildly to himself, _This is what I have always wanted._

 _“La niña ya est_ _á bailando por la calle de Sevilla!...”_

Sirius exits the final slam of his desplante with glory high in his veins, his body grateful for the slight pause as he digs his foot into a slow turn along with Benjy’s cante that brings him sinfully close to Remus once again. Their hips are nearly flush, intent and powerful and _Fuck,_ Sirius is glad for the fact his heart and lungs need the most blood right now or he would be in an awful situation. Remus traces Sirius’ arm with a flat hand as Sirius arcs it above his head, drawing Remus near as though he intends to envelop him—and he does, _oh,_ he does, he wants to keep his own hand pressed against the small of Remus’ back and carry him into the wings to continue this dance in the privacy of their own closeness—before the music picks back up and draws Sirius into a sharp quebrada that leads into his last burst of solo footwork. He hits it absolutely perfectly.

_“Caminito de la Alhambra/Camina una reina mora/Entre sabanas de Holanda!”_

Remus leads the charge into the final letra, a harried rush of flashing feet and regal arms, twisting, turning, around and in and about one another until the last several beats ring out—Sirius is in one last whirl of turns and tossing his arms out to prepare for his final pose, one last remate, one last slam of his heel, and then he’s _there._

The lights cut to black at just the right moment, the final note out like a candle snuffed to keep a secret, and Sirius feels the sweetest shock of all with Remus’ breath panting against his cheek. Their final tableau, one that Sirius is loathe to ever break, has them lunged into one another in a false embrace that Sirius wants more than anything to be real—written in ink, written in the stars, written on his skin currently flushing with the need to turn just an inch and touch his lips to Remus’. They’re right there. Just a turn, just a bit, and Sirius could have him.

But the moment must break, as there’s one last dance to be had on the program. Remus is the first to stand, lithe and quiet and pulling back, but not before Sirius’ heart gets one last shove to its struts.

 _“Guay,”_ Remus whispers at the height of Sirius’ jaw, and then he’s off into the wings like nothing but a dream.

Fuck.

For the first time in his life, flamenco isn’t the only thing by which Sirius is completely ensnared.

_Locura, tu nombre es Remus Lupin._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two more to go, whenever might they kiss?? :)))))))))))))))  
> Thank you, always, for reading <3


	7. Segunda Llamada

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One finds, as pieces fall into place, that few things can ever crow louder than the shouting thoughts of _Besalo, besalo, besalo._

_ Obras son amores y no buenas razones. _

—Spanish proverb

—

The alegrías begins as Sirius takes his final step into the wings, rattled and humming like a plucked string still singing its note, and he feels able to collapse in the safety of the backstage darkness. 

Sirius braces his hands on the painted-black brick wall beside the fly system, well away from the mechanism with a sign that shouts  _ PELIGRO  _ but still able to read it before he shuts his eyes and lets out a low, tremulous breath—peligro indeed, this fire in his heart, swallowing him with the residuals in his veins; sharing a dance, sharing air in what was so nearly a kiss that Sirius wants to laugh and weep and shout all at once—

“Bravo, guapito.”

Sirius hangs his head with another exhale and turns to face Marlene lounging there on her chair. He presses a stretch back into his shins, one by one, as an afterthought while his senses return all the same: the grit of the wall beneath his palms, the slightly smoky smell of the theatre’s dust burning up on the lights, the sound of Lily’s sweet cante and the organized clatter of heels as the women spin the alegrías to life onstage behind him. Marlene’s smile is calm, more than slightly knowing, and Sirius sniffs a soundless chuckle at her. “Gracias. How are you feeling?”

“Ay. Been better. This will give me problems for some time, I can tell, but such is life,” she sighs, whisper-soft to keep from disturbing the show. She leans forward to adjust the ice pack taped around her ankle and winces before Sirius kneels to do it for her. Marlene sits back as she pats his shoulder in thanks and continues to watch him with that little smile when he stands, a rarity of placidity on a face normally alight with wit instead of wisdom. “Estás tan jodido, Sirius.”

Sirius groans and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I  _ know, _ don’t remind me.”

“I don’t have to  _ remind _ you, I saw what just happened out there!” Marlene laughs through her whisper as she gestures out at the stage. “You’re mad for him, and don’t tell me I’m wrong. I’m never wrong about this shit.”

She’s right. Marlene could call any relationship from miles away—she was able to see James and Lily brewing several weeks out from James stammering around  _ Would you like to come get dinner,  _ and managed to set Amelia’s brother, Edgar, up with a woman from her office who ended up becoming his wife. Were it not so painfully accurate and now plaguing his own propensities, Sirius would go so far as to call her the casamentero of Taló de Plata. Faced with the truth, as sharp and complex and difficult to parse as his heart is, Sirius is powerless to continue denying it.

“What do I do, Malé?” Sirius leans heavily against the wall, distraught, heedless of the way it makes his jacket bunch up, and stares unseeingly at the whirl of mantonés and skirts onstage. 

“Look at Dora,” Marlene murmurs. Her expression softens and her eyes go silky when she automatically picks Dorcas out at the back of the formation, statuesque and smiling as she flicks the corner of her shawl up over her shoulder with a perfectly haughty shrug. Sirius feels sympathetic affection flutter in him, but the need to be contrarian overtakes it. 

“What, looking at your girlfriend will solve all my problems?”

Marlene swats him on the chest with the back of a flat hand and scowls flatly at him. “I’m making a  _ point, _ chacho. Look at her, look at the way she’s moving. Do you remember when she first started taking classes with us?”

Sirius turns back to the dancers and focuses on Dorcas. Once, she had been gawky and unsure of herself and it was impossible to drag even two words from her on a good day. Her footwork had been soft, mouse-quiet, afraid of making too much noise in the same way her arm work was stunted as though she didn’t trust that her limbs were so long or graceful. Gradually, and only then with time and the steady encouragement of Marlene’s friendship working in close tandem, she had opened up like a summer storm. Long, strong, confident, owning her severe beauty under the stage lights—Dorcas Meadowes is a far cry away from the timidity of her beginnings. “She could hardly stand to speak to us, and you had to strain to hear her feet.”

“Exactly. Now you’ve been fine since I met you, all macho even when you’re messing up the steps—”

_ “Thanks.” _

“—but her dancing is the same as your  _ feelings, _ perrito. You used to have three settings: angry, excited, and horny.” Marlene turns back to Sirius as she counts off on her fingers and waves them in front of his face. “Now don’t tell me things haven’t changed since you started spending more time with Remus, because that soleá was fucking magical.”

A strange mix of humor, embarrassment, frustration, and pride wells up in Sirius while he grabs Marlene’s hand and knits their fingers together in a fierce grip of camaraderie. “Thank you, Malé. That—it means a lot.”

“Do you know what else it means?”

“What’s that?” Sirius can’t help but color his whisper with a laugh when Marlene reaches forward and thumps him over the heart with their clasped hands. 

“It means you go into the dressing room and thank Remus for making you less of a porculero.” She grins broadly at Sirius’ scowl, glowering despite the warmth blooming in his chest. 

“When were you planning on telling me you had such colorful thoughts about my personality?” He sniffs another laugh when Marlene sticks out her good leg and prods him in the thigh with the tip of her toe. 

_ “Go, _ you idiot. Plenty of time for technicalities later. Now let me shout nice things at my woman, eh?” 

Sirius leaves Marlene with one last shared smile before she turns back to the stage and calls out a vibrant  _ Así se baila! _ alongside ringing palmas. His pulse still sits high in his chest from the exertion of his dance, but it’s woven itself now around something shaped like hope and a heavy dose of expectation. All things considered, it’s far from the worst feeling. 

Sirius passes Xeno in the wings and gets a solid clap to his shoulder in congratulations, which does little to calm him. The sound of the stage fades to a muted din behind him as Sirius passes through the dressing room curtain, and he finds it empty with a tiny clench in his throat. Remus’ station is vacant but Sirius is sure he’s back here—he hadn’t been in the wings or stayed onstage with the musicians—so Sirius sits down across from Remus’ mirror and waits. 

The velvet jacket from the seguiriyas is folded carefully on the vanity counter in front of him. Sirius finds himself smiling at the thought so at odds with how most inter-scene changes go; hectic, hurried, a flurry of fabric flung across chair backs and half-hung on hangers that, half the time, don’t end up properly hooked on the costume racks anyways. But Remus’ jacket is neatly tucked together, almost reverently, and with a slow and careful touch, Sirius traces the braiding that Remus had been repairing while they argued before the show began. The velvet presses in beneath his fingerprint like a pathway through wildflowers in the countryside, and Sirius is so taken by the moment of welcome pause that he doesn’t register the back entrance door  _ snik- _ ing shut or the soft clack of bota footsteps stopping short a few strides away until Remus speaks. 

“Hi.”

English, slightly breathless and entirely lovely; Sirius looks up with a start and his arm braced against the back of the vanity chair to see Remus standing, a bit windswept and smelling from here very faintly of cigarette smoke, with his collar undone. Sirius swallows before replying with his own pale “Hi,” just as reedy and afloat as Remus sounds. They simply look at one another for a moment, eye contact crackling invisibly, cataloguing one anothers’ expressions as though the answer to everything that passes between them might be hiding somewhere in the corner of some unsaid emotion, before Sirius breaks it with a self-conscious sniff of laughter to himself and flicks his eyes down to his feet. “I—thank you, for the soleá. I’m sorry I was an idiot.”

Remus sniffs an unbothered little chuckle at that, summatively brushing away the fact that Sirius had stood in his same spot less than an hour ago scrambling to save his stream of consciousness and clumsy excuses. “Not a problem, it was my pleasure.” 

He moves forward to slip his carton of Ducados into a side pocket on his duffel bag, bursting with dust bags cluttered around shoes and a folded newspaper sandwiched between several library books in their crackling protective covers, and Sirius tries not to burst just as well with the gentleness in Remus’ voice— _ It was my pleasure _ —or the subtle shifting of Remus’ tendons beneath the skin covered by the moon inked across the back of his hand. Sirius thinks distantly that it feels as though he’s stuffed full of snapping newspaper as well, or maybe the winnowing and endless ruffles of collars and sleeves and skirts spotted by infinite lunares; holes in his resolve that’s so weak now he nearly reaches out and takes Remus’ hand, would he want that? It just barely registers that he’s looking down at Sirius with a strange expression, something trapped between expectation and suspension, and Sirius is at a loss for what to do besides stand up and hold his ground carefully. 

“You dance...as though your heart is on fire.” Sirius’ tongue stumbles mightily around English when his unconscious decides to start talking for him, and he’s prepared to be angry at himself but for the perfect glory of a faint blush that fades in to tint the high points of Remus’ face. 

“Is that a good thing?”

“Yes!” Sirius lets fly a desperate little wheeze of laughter and steadies himself sideways on the vanity table. He cocks his head to the side and smiles at Remus, and the low light blurring the far edges of the dressing room seems to sigh as Remus matches the grin. “I’ve been trying to find how to say it for a long time now, and I think that one is the right way. Your heart is on fire, Remus Lupin.”

Remus tucks his bottom lip between his teeth with a gentle flicker of his tongue, a movement Sirius watches with unabashed attention. He’s done these steps before—stare at the lips, reach for an arm, nod at the shadowed corner,  _ Sigueme por ahi _ —but it’s never felt so slow and sweet. Remus’ eyes are alight from far beyond his irises, deep green-gold that seems drawn up from some bottomless spring of careful magic. Sirius wants to pour that color down his throat, coat himself in it, cover his hands and arms in a dye of it to stretch them out wet and stain canvas after canvas with it;  _ Sigueme hasta mi alma. _

“For how long is ‘a long time now’?”

“Cómo?” Sirius’ voice feels very far away after the half-second it takes for him to return to himself, and then Remus is chuckling again and pulling him even further out into the stratosphere of grasping adoration. 

“For how long have you wanted to tell me you’ve been thinking about my heart?” Remus murmurs in Spanish. He takes a step closer and Sirius’ breath catches high in his throat. Remus rests his own hand onto the vanity table, not leaning like Sirius but mimicking the cant if his head with such hushed enjoyment that Sirius can hardly count his pulse. 

Sirius swallows, pulling his free hand through his hair that he finds now has come down from his half-up knot, likely at some point during the bulerías. “Since the night I saw you dance in Chueca, before you even knew my name.”

Remus’ eyes widen so slightly that Sirius can almost tell himself he doesn’t see the motion, but it’s certainly there and it hits something bright and sharp within his core to catch at such subtle vulnerability. “De verdad?” Remus all but breathes. Sirius squeezes his own eyes shut briefly against the emotion etched in that voice and nods. 

“I haven’t been able to put you from my mind for months—” and the truth begins spilling like cheap wine, tumbling out over the rind and flesh of Sirius’ citrusy propensity to shoot himself in the foot but he doesn’t care, he  _ can’t _ care when Remus is staring at him like this—“at first I thought I was jealous, and then I thought I wanted to be friends, but now I know I  _ don’t _ want to be friends, Remus.”

Sirius pauses to catch his breath and sees the way Remus is watching him, equal parts amazement and trained placidity flickering in his pupils. The base of his throat is thrumming with each breath, quick and shallow, and Sirius wants to lick him there with such a sudden violence of thought that he nearly crumbles. Remus’ voice is light, like an errant snowflake from far up north, when he nearly whispers, “You don’t?” 

The audience on stage bursts with a perfectly ironic swell of applause, the sound mushing its way through the stage and into the dressing room like smoke, as Sirius bites down on his courage and slips his hand overtop of Remus’. He takes his time tracing the crescent tattoo with his thumb, feeling the strong sinew and delicate bones beneath it, warm and supple and  _ not flinching away, _ and he forces himself to eventually shake his head as he meets Remus’ gaze again. “I don’t suppose I could kiss you if we’re trying to be friends.”

“Couldn’t you now?” Remus’ eyebrows raise in light challenge, but his face is bright with anticipation. Sirius’ heart thunders behind his ribs and he wants to soar out into the theatre and shout with the unfettered joy of arrival. He slides his hand higher up on Remus’ arm, tender to hold at his forearm, and takes one step closer to him—nearly as close as they had been during the midpoint of the soleá. The silk of Remus’ sleeve is soft and warm, and the way he watches Sirius should be enough to sanctify the entire city. 

_ “Tales preguntas,” _ Sirius’ hissed whisper so full of vinegar that Remus smirks to himself, his lips curling deliciously. Sirius leans forward, his veins roaring like jaleo in his ears, his fingers gripping a bit more firmly to Remus’ arm while his left hand goes automatically to Remus’ hip, and—

“VAMO’ YA, PERDITOS, VEN— _ oh.” _

Sirius flinches backwards with a grimace and a badly-covered groan when James bursts through the stage entrance. His thoughts are still so fixated on the repeating stream of  _ Besalo, besalo, besalo _ , that, ripped out from the placidity of the moment, all he can do is turn on his heel and glare at James currently glancing between the two men with embarrassed regret writ through his eyebrows. 

_ “What,” _ Sirius grits through his teeth. His lungs tug nicely in his chest when Remus laughs to himself at the urgency, breathless and blushed, and Sirius moves his hand away from Remus’ hip while he leaves the one on his forearm like an obstinate claim to the moment they so nearly had to themselves. 

“The fin de fiesta, Minerva wants to start it. You already missed the curtain call!” James gestures vaguely at Sirius and Remus with a flail of his hands, a sort of  _ Whatever This Is Between You Bribónes  _ that makes Remus snort another laugh. Sirius can’t help but look at him hopelessly, enamored and so far down this foxhole that he would never want to be saved at this point anyways, and when Remus shoots him a secretive little grin it’s almost enough to soften the pang in Sirius’ heart that hits him as Remus steps apart to begin rolling his sleeves up to his elbows as he walks to the stage entrance.

“Gracias. Bulerías, no?” Remus’ tone is pleasantly brisk. Sirius wonders how the fuck he does it while James nods quickly. 

“Sí. Sirius,  _ venga.” _

“Ay,  _ okay!” _ Sirius hisses, stalking over as well when James jerks his chin at the stage with a frown. “You impatient nancy, it’s  _ fine, _ they’re still applauding.”

“And you ‘still’ missed your curtain call.” James grins a shitty little grin and bounds back out to the stage before Sirius can snap his own final word—seething blithely, Sirius jumps with the sudden warmth of touch on his lower back. Hot breath alights at his ear and the fingers against his shirt press in just slightly enough to make his spine thrill with what he’s quickly finding is an instinctive response to the nearness of Remus. He adores it quietly through every hallway in his body.

“Find me once you’re all set after this,” Remus whispers over the wild smatter of applause still happening in the theatre, calls for an encore and encouraging shouts from the lot of them; “I’m not done with you, hermoso.”

Oh, Marlene was right. Sirius is, summarily and deeply and in every way there could possibly be, so fucking fucked.

And it’s  _ paradise.  _

—

_ “Salud!” _

Sirius raises the cheap little shot glass and knocks back his sambuca along with the rest of the company, wincing as it goes down. He’s never been one for its sharp licorice flavor, but it’s good luck to drink in celebration.

And Sirius Black needs all the fucking luck in the world right now.

The fin de fiesta had been a hit. Minerva had given them the rare treat of singing the letra herself while James played behind her, and they’d all offered short snippets of dance to trade between each other as the audience encouraged them all with raucous, vibrant energy. Sirius had a beast of a time _ — _ _ Víbria  _ _ indeed— _ making sure he didn’t implode when he traded his own letra off to Remus. Sharp, saturated, open; the smile he had given to Sirius alone had been better than all the wine in Espa ña . The joy was palpable, and Sirius had even ducked into the wings with Benjy and Xeno to heft Marlene’s chair out onto the stage and deposit her at the center of the stage expectantly. Laughing and bashful for only all of four seconds, she had burst into a braceo combination paired with her one good leg stomping away from her seat that brought the audience to their loudest roar of approval yet. The sunniness of the whole show persisted throughout the encore, off into the wings, James and Benjy strumming the entire way as the company as a whole sang along with the end of Minerva’s cante, and now with all of them crammed into the dressing room downing the sambuca from Albus’ bottle.

“And!” Frank shouts above the low din of excitement radiating around everyone, “we can’t forget the saving man of the hour! To Remus, for being the bravest of us all tonight to dance across from Sirius!”

A glowing _Olé!_ rises up from all of them, emphatic in Sirius’ chest that also swells with a unique sort of pride, while Albus pours everyone another round. Remus laughs, his head thrown back slightly to bare that maddening cord of his neck once again, and Sirius bites the inside of his cheek with delectable anticipation. _I’m not done with you, hermoso;_ what the fuck could that mean? It could mean an awful lot of things, things about which Sirius has neither the attention span nor the patience to think right now.

“No, no, no, to  _ Marlene _ for giving us the most fearless  bulerías I think any of us has ever seen!” Remus passes on the accolade as he raises his now-filled glass in Marlene’s direction, sat on one of the vanity tops beside Dorcas with her foot propped on another chair—the need for a doctor’s attention is either forgotten or obstinately ignored in the face of a good time. Marlene laughs as well while she nods her head in a quick bow of thanks.

_ “Salud!” _ the company shouts again, and Sirius is certainly not imagining the way Remus finds his gaze across the circle with a flash of giddiness in his eyes as they tip back their liquid luck. 

Were it not for the taste, Sirius would take the bottle from Albus and down it in one go for good measure. 

They break apart with the promise to go for drinks afterward, out to the restaurants by Plaza de los Carros and too close to Sirius’ building for him to qualify an absence for distance. He feels, when he thinks a bit more secretively on it from the hectic haven of being bent over his rucksack as he crams his costumes within, strangely stripped—a bare wire in his bones lit from within to singe him steadily from his marrow outwards. It’s far from the worst feeling, but hell if it isn’t confounding.

“Are you for drinks?”

Sirius looks up with a pleasant clutch in his heart when Remus speaks from a few steps away, addressing him through the mirror. He’s back in street clothes with his bag hefted onto his shoulder, jacket pulled tightly around him. Sirius begins pulling off his shoes and nods. “Will you save me a seat? I might stop home first and change, drop off my bag, all that.”

“Ahh, I don’t think I can go,” Remus replies with a wince. Sirius tries not to let his face fall too obviously, but Remus chuckles at him nonetheless. “I have to open the shop tomorrow, I’ll need to be up too early. And I’ve also a paper to revise.”

Sirius flicks his gaze to and fro, making sure no one else is pressed close enough to listen closely to their conversation, before he looks over his shoulder to catch Remus’ stare front-on instead of in reflection.  _ “ _ _ Encuéntrame cuando estés listo?” _ Sirius parrots, a murmur with one eyebrow just barely raised. He doesn’t imagine the way Remus blushes ever so slightly and swallows around a pause for a moment before nodding.

“Yes. I’m going to have a cigarette, could you join me?” Remus’ voice is a shade lighter than normal, and Sirius finds that he enjoys the way his face remains slightly tinged with self-consciousness when nothing else Remus Lupin has ever done has held any sort of doubt. But Sirius wouldn’t call this doubt, more of just waiting to see something unfold. He decides he likes it very much and turns back to nestling his shoes in their dust bag with a secretive little grin to himself.

“Guay.”

Remus bites his lips together to hold in what Sirius can tell from the light in his eyes would have been a very broad smile indeed. The potential of it does beautiful things to Sirius’ insides.

Remus raises a hand and calls a broad goodnight to the dressing room as Sirius continues packing up, and Marlene hobbles over to press a fierce little kiss to Remus’ cheek as he goes. To Sirius’ combined chagrin and glee, she ends up leaning against Sirius’ station when the stage door shuts behind Remus.

“Fucking tell me you’re going home with him tonight,” she hisses. Sirius can’t help the laughter that barks its way out of him.

“I don’t know about that, it’s a school night.”

Marlene thwacks him on the arm and only makes him split with another chuckle. “I’m not kidding, perrito, tell me you’re going to do something about that!” She flings her open palm at the door, and Sirius assuages her with a hushing sound.

_“Patience,_ Malé. There’s an art to this.” Sirius relishes the comfort of being a dick, safe in the confines of his friendship with Marlene. She looks at him flatly. Sirius would never reveal to her how much he truly  _wants_ to take Remus home, but she can see it without asking and knows just how to tease.

“What, now you’re channeling Picasso?”

“Too modern.”

Marlene snorts. “Sirius Black, painter of saints and devils on the walls of the Almudena. Bueno?”

Sirius winks, zipping his back shut and tossing his coat around his shoulders. “Bueno.”

He leaves with his own pair of kisses to Marlene’s cheeks, promising to share a bottle of wine with her later tonight, and says his own encompassing farewell to the company left in the dressing room. The stage door protests with a stuffy squeal to see him into the backstage hallway, and Sirius is grateful for his habit of keeping an umbrella in his dance bag when he hears the rushing hum of rain playing beyond the stage door.

Sirius opens the exit to the street and curses under his breath at the surprising hammer of downpour that greets him, the wet hiss of nature’s way of cleansing the city in an autumn deluge so much better suited for a lie-in at home than a night out, before his breath catches in his throat to remind him that Remus has likely been waiting for him in this  chaparrón for more than a couple minutes. He wrestles the umbrella open and turns from side to side, squinting in the dark throw of street lamps on twilight, before seeing the vague shape of Remus huddled under the tiny and useless overhang of a  café entrance shut tight for the night. Sirius jogs over to him, avoiding puddles and hunching his shoulders against the buffeting racket of rain, with the umbrella outstretched to shield Remus before Sirius reaches him.

“What the fuck, Remus! You could have waited for me inside!” Sirius has to raise his voice slightly above the weather’s noise, and Remus smiles at him around a sucking inhale on a lit cigarette. Sirius’ heart bottoms out.  _ Me alimentas, _ he thinks with a wild throw of quiet passion.

“Not likely, I really needed a smoke. I don’t fancy that stage manager coming after me with her clipboard for lighting up in the hallway.” Remus exhales as he speaks, the smoke pluming out from his mouth only to be splattered away in the madness of raindrops, and offers the cigarette to Sirius filter-first. They’re standing quite close to both remain dry beneath the umbrella, and so Sirius needs only to lean forward slightly to take it between his lips. As he draws on it, the cherry end glows and illuminates Remus’ face like candlelight. Sirius’ lungs do pirouettes within his ribs.

“And you couldn’t wait two minutes? I thought  _ I _ was an adicto.” Sirius speaks around the cigarette and shares a smirk with Remus before he takes his own drag, the ease of the habit bleeding slowly through him after a few seconds. Remus chuckles, a tight sound, and Sirius doesn’t pry while he waits for the other man to finish glancing down at his feet.

“I was...raw for it.” The vocabulary is harsh in Remus’ Spanish,  _ En rama _ spinning from his tongue as his lips twitch unevenly into a smile. Sirius’ pulse quickens, high in his throat, and he passes the cigarette back to Remus in wordless invitation. Remus takes it with that subtle grin of his and takes a deep inhale while Sirius reigns his patience in carefully while he waits for Remus to continue. “Something —it was even directly after we danced, I had to dash here for one before I saw you in the green room because I was just…” Remus gestures in circles with a flat left hand, the cigarette held between his index and middle finger, aimless to draw up thoughts before he sniffs another dry laugh and switches to English; “I’m suddenly very aware, Sirius, of feelings I’ve been trying to ignore.”

Sirius struggles briefly to swallow when Remus looks up at him, their heights nearly even. Remus’ lips twitch with nervous kineticism, quirking up at their corners before he presses them together and chews at them softly for a few moments. “What sort of feelings?” Sirius offers his own cobbled English and, for their proximity that he very suddenly realizes is nearer than they’ve ever before stood offstage, watches Remus’ eyes soften sweetly. Sirius can’t help himself and matches that watery little smile, suddenly self-conscious, and gratefully accepts another offering of Remus’ cigarette.

“You said it yourself.” Remus’ voice trembles, just enough, and Sirius looks up through his draw around the smoke—it fills his mouth like cotton and he’s very glad for a moment that he doesn’t need to speak while he waits for Remus to finish that thought. Everything in Remus’ stare is alight, flicking along the planes of Sirius’ face; his nostrils flare slightly, his jaw flexes, and Sirius absorbs the sight of him as the rain roars down around them, as though they’re the only two afloat in a sea surging through this theatre alley. Remus plucks the cigarette from Sirius’ hold and flicks it to the wet cobbles at their feet before smudging it out with a soft step; Sirius is sure that part of his mind shuts off completely when Remus puts that same hand to the collar of Sirius’ jacket. “I do believe my heart is on fire.”

He can’t let himself believe it when he exhales the smoke still held behind his tongue, letting it out on a thin huff through his nose—he can’t let himself believe it until Remus takes a half-step closer and darts his tongue over his lips, the motion Sirius has watched before countless times and tried to put out of his mind,  _ Sólo somos amigos,  _ and yet in this moment it feels more like  _ Sólo somos humanos, _ something out of a dream but so grippingly inevitable that Sirius can only close his eyes.  _ The rest is just life _ —is this what happens, then, when Sirius truly embraces that explanation for the chance that’s brought him here? He decides, in an instant, that perhaps he’s had some fine ideas after all.

He kisses Remus Lupin and the world slides away.

Sirius forgets that it’s raining, the clatter of it instead becoming an enveloping whisper of arrival that this, yes,  _ finally _ this, it’s happening and Sirius isn’t just imagining it. He can feel the solid warmth of Remus’ neck beneath his palm where he’s instinctively reached up to cradle him, close and intent; feel the inward thrill of Remus sighing against his lips, relaxing into him as though they had continued their dance offstage and backstage and throughout the sambuca toasts, exhausting and riling before finally ending here—this finale of the slightest hesitation but more than anything an understanding.  _ I have given part of myself over to you now, _ Sirius feels his heart shouting, leaping against his ribs while it sings with the resonant ferocity of Remus’ tongue tipping his own ever so slightly;  _ You hold me in your hands and I will trust no one else with that as long as I live. Te quiero, te deseo, te adoro.  _

He doesn’t believe it can get any sweeter as their lips move slowly against each other, and it’s then that Remus pulls back by the barest millimeter to catch his breath and smile to himself against Sirius’ mouth. Sirius feels it like a glorious bolt of freedom, happiness, as though his chest is pulling itself open and blossoming thick with ivied crests of crocus flowers.  _ “Por encontrar un beso tuyo,/¿qué daría yo?”  _ He quotes Lorca blindly on a tiny skiff of laughter, and when Sirius opens his eyes he sees Remus gazing at him as though he’s hung the stars. 

_ “Y por besar tus muslos castos/¿qué daría yo?”  _ Remus’ eyes are bright with adoration and intrigue as he returns the passage, and pure fantastic sensation wends its way into Sirius’ heart the way he’s only read about before—the branches of Lorca suffuse him with splendor, and he dives back against Remus’ mouth with renewed intent to lick into the seam of those waiting lips. Welcoming, hungry, smiling against each other, Sirius never wants this to end. Their teeth  _ tik _ against each other a few times for their insistent press into nearness, they miss the rhythm of the steady push-pull inherent in sharing air like this, but it’s as close to perfection Sirius can ever think he’s gotten in his entire life. The missteps in this dance are, for the first time, beautiful.

Sirius forgets about the umbrella until it slips askew in a grip that has moved to favor Remus’ waist, and it’s only the feeling of rainwater seeping down the back of his neck that makes him draw back from the glory of kissing Remus. “Sorry, sorry.” His soft apology is breathless as he rights the umbrella and swipes softly at Remus’ hair, still parted at one side in his performance style but now dotted with rain.

There’s a terrifying moment, the smallest half-second that feels as though it goes on forever, in which Sirius thinks Remus might misconstrue the apology as trying to forgive the kiss—as if anything that moment could have been an accident, as if anything Sirius does to be close to Remus has ever been a  _ fucking accident— _ but Remus breaks the momentary tension with another bright grin and reaches up to tuck a piece of Sirius’ hair behind his ear. 

“No sorry, hermoso.” His voice shimmers with a new color, a new tone like a re-tuned string resonating perfectly with its instrument after a long time of being not quite there, and Sirius is mad for it. He dives back in against Remus’ lips without letting himself say anything else, because what could mean more than trading breath with this man after stepping around the possibility for so long? Sirius Black is through lying to himself. He’s tired of playing caretas with his own spirit.

This?

This is existence itself.

They kiss until Sirius can hardly tell his left from his right, but his hand begins to ache from holding the umbrella between them after several long minutes. “Venga,” he murmurs against Remus’ lips in a rare pause. He strokes his thumb through the short hair at the base of Remus’ neck and drinks in the sight of those massive pupils and lips like cerezas; “Can you come back to mine?”

Remus sniffs a wild little laugh, something that sounds like it should have brambles in bloom woven around it and feels like a summer wind on Sirius’ face. “I wish I could, but I still need to be so early in tomorrow.”

“You can walk to Stela’s from  Lavapiés, I do that every morning,” Sirius whispers as he moves against Remus’ neck, pressing slow kisses there; he doesn’t want to be That Fucking Dandi, the one who tries to casanova his way into everyone’s trousers just because he can, but forgive him if he doesn’t want to part ways with the only person to ever make Sirius’ body feel so whole.

Remus grants him the miracle of sighing a soft little moan and leaning into those kisses,  gripping just a bit closer to Sirius, but he shakes his head. “I need books from home for class as well, I—it doesn’t do for the graduate to show up in somebody else’s clothes the day I give an exam to the Bachelor’s students, no?” Remus skips out another desperate shear of a laugh around his words when Sirius mouths at the height of his jaw, but Sirius understands logic despite the hammering racket of his heart and pulls back. They stare at one another in sweet silence, more than a bit dampened by Sirius’ inability to keep the umbrella quite straight amid their kisses but not minding even a whit.

“You’re right, but that doesn’t mean I need to like it.” Sirius smiles along with Remus’ grin at the reluctant acquiescence, and he can’t help himself to pull Remus in for one last kiss. It’s a deep, soft, twisting thing, and Sirius knows deep down that this will be something that holds his daydreams aloft for longer than he might ever need for it.

When Remus pulls back he’s panting slightly—Sirius is wont to admit how alluring that reality is to him. “Neither do I. Tomorrow afternoon.” Remus pauses to hitch his bag a bit higher on his shoulder and swallows, collecting himself. “I’m through with classes after 4:00. Come meet me at Stela’s, and we’ll go from there to get a drink?”

“Can we skip the drink?”

Sirius doesn’t care how stupid or desperate he seems for that, but it’s the truth. Fuck drinks, fuck small talk, all he needs the next time they both have the convenience is  _ Remus. _ He prays it comes across without saying so, and the way Remus’ expression melts ever so slightly into a hitch of adoration is hopefully the confirmation of that. “ Sí, hermoso, we can skip the drink.”

Remus is the one to toss his red capote at self control this time and tug Sirius back into a kiss, by which Sirius is more than happy to oblige before they step apart again. Sirius’ swimming gaze catches the light of a passing búho trundling down the street beyond the alley before he meets Remus’ stare again. “Can I walk you to your train?”

“Ordinarily yes,” Remus teases, still holding Sirius’ lapels and tugging at them playfully now in a way that makes Sirius’ guts twist with too much affection for words; “but you’re too charming for me, I’m afraid, and I don’t trust myself not to let you inside when we get there.”

Sirius lets out a heavy sigh and bunts their foreheads together with a light groan. “You’re right. I’m a dog.”

_ “Perrito.” _ The way Remus says it, just a bit sing-song and with the vowels all drawn-out like that, makes Sirius fall even harder. He hadn’t know that was possible.

“Will you at least take my umbrella?”

Remus glances over at his shoulder to the bus stop across the way, a covered beacon in this awful weather to take Remus far away to wherever it is he stays, before shaking his head. “No need, I’ll be fine.

“Estás seguro?” Sirius furrows his brow and tips the umbrella handle closer to Remus. “I take the metro, I'll hardly need it.”

“I’ll be  _ fine, _ Sirius, don’t worry for me.” Remus seems to take an extra moment to himself, self-indulgent, before reaching up and sweeping his fingers into the nape of Sirius’ hair and drawing them into another kiss —this one is written through with the night’s finality but also, somehow, thick with the promise of more sometime soon. Sirius melts into, eager and hungry and desperate for this connection that he’s found like an oasis in his own desert. Reflecting pool notwithstanding, unless he counts that amazing shade of Remus’ eyes. He takes his time, slow and deep, to pour all of his intent into Remus’ mouth. When they separate for the last time, they’re both addled by adoration.

“Goodnight, Remus.” Sirius’ voice is distant, graveled, and he feels the need to say so much more than that right behind his teeth. He manages to keep quiet, and Remus leaves him with one final touch to the height of his jaw; a cupped stroke, precious and careful, as through Sirius is something precious to him. 

Just  _ barely, _ Sirius keeps quiet.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.  Que sueñes bien.” Remus’ smile is eager as anything Sirius has ever seen, and before Sirius can comment with anything more than returning that sunshine smile, Remus is out from under the umbrella and crossing into the downpour with quick, graceful steps. Sirius watches him disappear into a purple-shadow smudge split by raindrops, and when he sees the shape of Remus alight beneath the  _ EMT _ sign that will summon another great, snorting beast of a bus, Sirius raises a hand in farewell. Remus’ shimmering shadow responds in kind through the sheets of rain, and Sirius’ heart pulls with a combination of craving and peace.

Sirius turns on his heel, down to the opposite mouth of the alley, and decides the would much prefer to go home on his own tonight. He can cavort with his friends any other night, but tonight is a night for reflecting. Tonight is a night for preserving the memory of what just transpired in a rainy alleyway on the edge of Malasaña, a holy rite to consecrate the sangre and carne of his own beating heart in the privacy of his own thoughts.

Tomorrow, he will face the day with determination for whatever else will follow.

Tonight, Sirius Black will give himself permission to believe that things might be getting better after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3 One more to go! Thanks, as ever, for sticking around to dance with this one ^^


	8. Final

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Al fin de fiesta, de la historia, del _mundo_ , there is still one last moment to share.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The record players in this chapter are spinning plot-adjacent movements from De Falla's _Amor Brujo,_ a Spanish symphonic suite from the early 1900s.

_Amar sin deseo es peor que comer sin hambre._

—Spanish proverb

—

_“...Candela qué ardes/más arde el infierno/que toíta mi sangre/abrasá de celos!”_

The sunlight sighing its way through the pale curtains is soft, finer than silk, but the music pushing through Sirius’ north-facing wall is anything but. He groans against his pillow, feeling as though his head and his heart weigh a thousand kilos all at once, and fades into waking alongside his neighbor’s latest choice of rapacious symphonic madness.

_“¡Ay!/Cuando el río suena/¿qué querrá decir?/Por querer a otra/se orvía de mí!/¡Ay! Cuando el fuego abrasa/Cuando el río suena;/Si el agua no mata el fuego,/a mí el penar me condena,/a mí el querer me envenena,/a mí me matan las penas.”_

Sirius laughs bitterly to himself and groans again, cursing fate and the sun and the night just past all at once. Lorca, Lorca, todavía _fucking Lorca._ He throws himself onto his back and scrapes his hair back from his forehead before he drapes an arm there, biting his lips together and probing their seam with a sleepy tongue as though he might still be able to feel Remus on them.

_Remus._

The driving twelve-count of De Falla’s strings finish their thrum through the old drywall before giving way to something less insistent, more mysterious, likely soundtracking a perfect mimicry of his neighbor’s hyper-modern painting style—he’s seen it once before through her open door several months ago when they arrived home at the same time once, it’s beautiful albeit violent—and Sirius lets his memory spiral backwards sweetly. It had been everything he could have dreamed, to share a kiss with Remus like that. And it hadn’t been some rushed broom closet job either, no; a proper arrival, all romance and rain and just enough of a dive into the undeniable chemistry between them to make Sirius’ insides racket for more, _more,_ too much more. He had come home last night and not even been able to make it to bed before his desires had thrown themselves against their limits, locking the front door behind him and dropping his rucksack to the floor in the same motion that saw Sirius fumbling open his belt buckle to lean back against the wall and have himself off right there. He hadn’t even removed his shoes first. He is, he remembers with a twist his guts, back to finishing with visions of gold and the seguiriyas in his mind.

Quizás, he thinks now as he draws a lazy hand down his face and sighs heavily into the recall of such hurried bliss, it had been best for both of them to hold off that ‘too much’ for another evening. Sirius wouldn’t want Remus thinking he’s _that_ insatiable, regardless of what reality might show.

 _I’ll see you tomorrow;_ never before has a lingering promise like that felt so lovely in the back of Sirius’ dreams. Remus’ voice curved around those words like seaglass, beckoning Sirius in a way Remus might never know the natural allure of. _Tomorrow._

Which has now become _Today,_ and Sirius can’t decide whether to dissolve or shout for joy at the harrowing glory inherent in that.

The trilling of Sirius’ telephone cuts off his reverie, sharp from the kitchen like an impatient parrot, and he strings together a low oath under his breath as he swings his legs out from under his covers and stretches into a long, standing yawn. His muscles are singing with sweet fatigue as they always do after a hard rehearsal or such a performance, and he winces one eye shut to pull a twist through his torso as he walks out into his tiny sitting room and picks up the handset from the kitchen counter.

“Sí,” the prompting syllable clouded by another yawn.

_“Unless you’ve got Bulerías-On-Legs still twisted up in your sheets, you have zero excuse for not coming out with us last night.”_

Sirius winces. Marlene sounds as awake as ever, and Sirius wonders not for the first time if the woman ever actually sleeps. He leans his forearms against the counter and holds the phone between his ear and shoulder while he sighs into it, pulling another stretch through each leg in a lunge. “Sorry, Malé, I came home alone.”

_“And why would you do that?!”_

Sirius looks out his east-facing sitting room window, cutting lines of light into and over his furniture, and rests his cheek on one fist as he sings to himself. “We both agreed to save that for today instead.”

 _“So you could have come with us then,”_ Marlene harps, blazing past the heavy insinuation of conquest that Sirius had hoped would have derailed her well enough. Sirius can hear her banging away at breakfast, clattering pans and something sizzling wending in through the phone. His stomach growls.

“I was...tired.” He scratches at the hint of morning stubble on his chin as he says it—the excuse is lame, but Sirius does his best to ignore the way his syntax hitches. Marlene doesn’t believe him for a second and scoffs mightily.

_“And I had my ankle wrapped up in medical tape. Admit it, you’re getting old.”_

Sirius rolls his eyes to the ceiling and bends backward, stretching the cords of his back as he takes the phone with him. When he speaks, his voice is tight with the tug of releasing muscles; “If _I’m_ getting old, you’re well on your way beside me.”

_“And we’ll bring the village down around us.”_

The flat fervor in Marlene’s tone takes Sirius unawares, and he breaks with a laugh that shoots him back up into a standing position lest he wrench his spine. “Perfect plan,” he sighs. Sirius shakes a hand through his hair and leans back on the counter as though Marlene stands across from him to see his expectant expression; “Now did you call me just to pick with your bird feet, or did you truly have something to say?”

The mental image of Marlene putting a hand on her hip and leaning back against the wall is vivid when she makes a characteristic noncommittal sound. _“I just wanted to check in. You were so sure about going out last night, I figured you either went with Remus instead or died.”_

“Your faith in me is staggering, Malé.”

Marlene continues beyond Sirius’ interjection as though he hadn’t even spoken— _”I was going to call Remus next, honestly I’m just surprised I reached you here inst_ —”

“You have his phone number?! How?” Sirius grips the handset harder as though the telephone itself could cough up the answer for him. Marlene snorts, the signal crackling for its force.

_“Minerva gave us a new company directory when Albus and everyone joined. What, don’t tell me you were too busy staring at your amadoso and forget to get one?”_

Wrapping his hand around the phone cord unconsciously, in and around, in and around, Sirius shrugs automatically. “Quizás.”

 _“You’re a MESS.”_ Marlene groans. She sounds as though she’s taking a breath to lay further into Sirius’ tendencies, but the distant garble of someone else’s speech in the background of her line cuts her off.

“Is that Dorcas? Tell her I say good morning,” Sirius says with a raised voice.

The brief clatter of off-piece conversation followed by the distinct sound of a tidy little kiss bleeds through the phone as Marlene calls out a cheerful farewell ahead of a door shutting, and the smile that persists into her reassuming attention to the phone is just evident enough to pull at Sirius’ heart. _“She says good morning yourself, and is wanting to know why you made her finish an entire bottle of wine on her own.”_

Sirius catches his reflection in the sitting room mirror, and he flexes and points his left foot with lazy attention while he watches the muscles in his leg shift with each movement. He smirks into the phone. “And how could I have done that without being there?”

_“Easy. You weren’t there to help her drink it, so it’s your fault.”_

“Okay, fine. I’m a villain, an absolute bastard, how dare I need _sleep_ after a very long and confusing performance.” The smile in Sirius’ voice is evident, and Marlene thankfully sighs with the gentle surrender of her stubbornness.

 _“Was it really confusing, perrito?”_ Through the phone comes the sound of Marlene scraping her pan onto a plate, her voice softer as she goes. Sirius chews on his bottom lip.

“I mean—yes. Yes it was, and you helped afterward in the wings, but...no sé, Malé. This is something bigger than me.” Sirius pulls a hand through his slightly-tangled hair and shrugs. “Covering it with a night out would have pulled me apart.”

_“Oh, I know, querido. I just like pushing your buttons, no?”_

Sirius has a fantastic innuendo ready to go on his tongue, but he catches sight of the clock on his wall and hisses a sharp oath to himself. “Shit, I have to go.”

Marlene is clearly chewing around her breakfast when she chuckles into the phone while Sirius begins casting about for fresh trousers. _“Don’t tell me you’re late.”_

“I’m _fucking late,_ Malé, and what else would you expect?” Sirius snatches up a pair of jeans slung haphazardly across the back of his armchair with last week’s folded laundry, reaching out for it at the end of the telephone cord’s length. “Mil gracias for dragging my ass out of bed, but now there’s coffee to be had.”

Marlene hums with cool intrigue. _“And suddenly when he needs to fuck, he turns into a complete hueso.”_

“Ha _ha,_ and yet he’s laughing at your funny joke,” Sirius deadpans. “Can I call you back later?”

_“Call me back whenever, I’m at home all day with my ankle. Lots of shitty television to watch and Dora at my beck-and-call—honestly? Nothing has changed, only now I have just one foot for a while.”_

Sirius barks a laugh and shakes his head as he combs through clothes enough to find a clean pullover, a grey jumper with some logo on it Sirius vaguely remembers from a thrift store some years ago. “Bueno. Te veo luego, bruja.”

_“Adiós, feo.”_

Marlene’s line clicks into a dial tone and Sirius stretches wide to hang his own handset back on its receiver. He shoves the bundle of clothes into one arm and beelines to the bathroom, intent on waking himself up with a searing shower and vigorous wash—eageness hums in his veins like quicksilver, light and fast to striate his heart. He thinks, as she strips and shuts his eyes, ducking into the wide and echoing spray behind the swath of the shower curtain, that perhaps Marlene is right. Perhaps he _is_ getting old, a wandering soul trapped ahead of his time now for always having to look ahead to the next thing on which to latch his hope.

But perhaps, in Remus, he’s finally found another half of that whole.

—

The entire second half of the walk to Stela’s is an inner war with himself not to break into a run. The distant tolling of the Colegiata clashes with San Pedro and San Andrés at once when the clock strikes ten—a holy trinity shouting in brass at all of Sirius’ most _un_ holy spurrings—to announce that Remus’ shift is about to end. Still two blocks away, Sirius skips through a red light and only narrowly avoids a woman on a scooter who shouts loudly at him as he trips past onto the safety if the curb. _Hola, yes, sorry, I thought it terribly romantic to show up with both my kneecaps broken,_ Sirius thinks with aimless compulsion as he sees Stela’s storefront just down the block and picks up his brisk walk to an even brisker trot. He imagines the way Remus might react when he opens the door earlier than Sirius had promised to see him, maybe leaning over a sheaf of his latest readings; his glasses perched low on his nose, pushing them up on his face out of delicate habit as he glances up, sees Sirius, blushing as he breaks into that radiant fucking smile of his and—

“Bienvenido, benos días!”

Sirius stops in the doorway when, instead of Remus standing sentinel demigod at the register, Daniel waves at him with casual greeting. He tries twice for words before his throat works properly, and a grumpy old tía bustles past him as Sirius finally clears his throat. “Hola, I—eh, I was—I was planning to meet Remus here this morning?” _I was supposed to have the chance to tell him all the things I couldn’t last night because I was choking on my own fucking ecstasy, I—_ Sirius steps out from the door, shaking his head with a short toss and looking up at Daniel with a pained grin to clear those racketing thoughts.

“Ah! He—oh, un momento.” Daniel’s face lights up briefly, the broad planes of his forehead and cheeks creasing with a smile that makes it to those sharp blue eyes of his that Stela is always sighing about, before the little old woman shuffles over to the register and clears her throat loudly. Daniel holds up a finger to Sirius as he dives sweetly into conversation with the customer, clearly a regular with the way she launches into a story about her granddaughter’s wedding, and Sirius does his best not to groan as he leans back against the wall and crosses his arms. He settles in to wait for lord knows _how_ long. Spanish grandmothers are a conversational force to be reckoned with.

“...sí, sí, señora, estoy seguro de que fue. Sirius, ven aquí.”

Sirius looks up when Daniel jerks his chin over his shoulder and nods at the espresso machine, finally extricated from his saintly chat about dresses and garlands. Sirius rounds the counter with a small payment of his most nephew-worthy handsome smile at the old woman before he looks down at the bartop and sees a pair of americanos propped atop a torn corner of note paper. “Did abuela buy me a drink?” Sirius mutters in a low voice

Daniel laughs as he shakes his head. “No, it’s from Remus.”

Sirius’ heart twists in and around itself. Leave it to Remus to preempt Sirius flailing out like the hopeless romantic he is. Sirius asks—as though he didn’t have Remus’ weekly shift schedule memorized by the accident of falling head over heart—“Verdad? He’s supposed to be in around this time, no?”

Daniel lets slip a little flicker of a smile. Sirius Black is and always has been a terrible liar. “Yes, he called in this morning with a monster of a head cold,” Daniel says through a light sigh. He taps twice on the piece of paper, sliding it out into view from under the leftmost cup. “This is his phone number, he said you might stop by and wants you to call him.”

Sirius could kiss each one of the other man’s bushy black eyebrows with loud _smek’_ s for the virility of relief and excitement that surges up from his depths at that, but Daniel is already turning back to the old woman and asking after which church they booked for the wedding. Sirius stuffs the slip of paper into his back pocket, pays with more change than he needs to, takes up both cups, and shoulders his way back out to the street with a harried pace in his step to find the nearest phone booth.

The street seems to sing a bit more brightly from this headspace now: the traffic growling past has more of a purr to it, the sun feels mellow instead of sharp, the pavement even crunches with a touch of laughter in it beneath Sirius’ shoes. Had he the room in his thoughts to worry over his own tendencies, he would be mortified. But as it stands, the most he can bother himself to worry about it jostling his way into the phone booth without upending either of coffees.

Once inside—and very gingerly so, as though the lids might bite if he tilts them incorrectly—Sirius sets the cups down on the tiny lip of a self above the corded phone book stored beneath the telephone. He digs for coins in one back pocket as he fishes Remus’ phone number out from the other, and with change and paper in hand Sirius pauses for a moment. His heart thrums against his ribs as though he had Remus stood before him, waiting for another kiss. _Y por besar tus muslos castos/¿qué daría yo?_ Sirius closes his eyes and shivers. No good to be thinking about Remus’ thighs before dialing his fucking phone number.

The paper hisses across Sirius’ fingertips as he smoothes it open. He had, in his stupor of soppishness, hoped for Remus’ angular handwriting—tight and compact, an academic’s penmanship, scrawled and looping like crushed kindling. But Daniel’s rounded numbers meet him there instead, jotted down quickly from wherever they take their calls at Stela’s, and Sirius does his best to ignore the way his heart deflates just a little. He thumbs his coins into the telephone slot and, as they clatter away into the annals of arcas municipales, keys in the string of Remus’ phone number.

The line rings three times, each successive warble ratcheting Sirius’ guts up into his throat, before the other end picks up and Sirius perhaps forgets to breathe somewhat.

Marlene was right. He _is_ a mess.

 _“Bueno?”_ The voice easing through the wire is undoubtedly Remus, all kelly green and caramel filtered by the crackle of distance and the familiar fug of congestion just subtle enough to push at Sirius’ affections.

“Good morning,” Sirius manages in English, a skip of laughter invading his instincts without him meaning to put it there. “How are you feeling?”

_“Sirius!”_

The breathless little smile there in Remus’ voice, whether imaginary or not, starts a small tremor at the base of Sirius’ lungs and shakes up a smile like trueno dorado. “Hola,” he murmurs as he leans against the side of the phone booth. “You sound as though you maybe needed my umbrella.”

Remus laughs through the phone, and Sirius is deeply glad to be leaning against a solid surface for the way that sound carves into the stability in his shins. _“Yes, that choice was more nobility than anything else.”_ He breaks for a cough, its timing tinged with irony, and sniffs another laugh at that which Sirius can’t help but share. _“Remind me to be more selfish next time.”_

“‘Next time’ makes it sound like you’re planning things, Mr. Lupin.” Sirius chews at his top lip, half anxious and half thrilled to flirt through the phone like this, as he re-crosses his arm and pulls a hand through his hair. Remus sighs a tiny sigh that rattles slightly on his congestion.

_“I know, I’m sorry. Believe that I entirely meant to meet you after classes this afternoon, but I didn’t even make it to campus.”_

“Ahhh.” Sirius tries not to let his disappointment echo through his sigh, but he knows it’s out the coattails of the breath before he can catch it back. He rubs at the back of his neck, self-conscious, and casts his glance out at the corner of the street through the scrimmy phone booth panels as though someone outside is holding up a sign telling him what to say next. _No hay tal suerte._ “I think I’m free on Tuesday evening, if you want to meet then instead?”

The air between them thickens in a strange way—Sirius feels the beat of apprehension in his fingertips as Remus’ breath just barely stutters on his end of the phone. Sirius nearly scrambles to cover his words, but how would he say that differently? _Sorry, hermoso, I’ll let you be sick, call me when you’re ready to fuck?_ Ay, María, he’s fucking hopeless. Sirius crams his fist in front of his mouth and huddles even further into the corner of the phone booth as what feels like forever and an age passes before Remus answers.

_“I—don’t live very far from Stela’s. If you’d still like to see me today we could do that, unless you’d rather wait?”_

“Sí, yes, exactly that, are you sure?” Sirius rockets into a stand, gripping the side of the telephone stand and nodding at nothing. Remus laughs again, a broader sound this time, to quell that ridiculous heat in Sirius’ belly while stoking it all at once.

 _“Yes. You’ll have to get on the train, I live in Chamberí by the Quevedo station. Is that okay?”_ A nervous tremor is just barely evident under the stuffiness of Remus’ cold, and Sirius is glad for the visual anonymity of a phone call for the first time since hearing Remus’ voice when he realizes that his eyebrows have risen high with the discovery of Remus’ neighborhood. He had known Remus’ father is a diplomat, but he had never thought to spend much time thinking about the sort of livelihood Remus might be used to. Chamberí is the very definition of castizo and not quite what Sirius would have imagined when Remus said he lives ‘by the university,’ but Sirius knows he shouldn’t be surprised. He lowers his eyebrows and nods again.

“That’s completely fine. Then I should be there within the hour if I leave now, yes?”

_“Yes, but I would think you might need my address first.”_

Sirius doesn’t let himself believe that he’s blushing as he smirks. “Well, it could maybe help. Just a little.”

_“Bueno, hermoso. Do you have a pen?”_

Sirius can’t quit grinning to himself as Remus coaches himself through his address and Sirius scratches it onto the back of the slip of paper from the café with quick fingers. Latent need is coursing through him by the end of it, and his own propensity for foolishness in the face of lovely things makes him heave a slow sigh as he eases the address into his back pocket again. “Pues. I’ll see you soon, do you need me to bring you anything? A newspaper, food, flowers…?”

Remus chuckles to himself, low in his throat, and Sirius does not miss the way that sound wrenches at him right behind his navel. _“Just yourself, Sirius. That’s all I think I find myself in need of lately.”_

He just barely sighs when he says it, a ghost of a whisper, but with such softness that Sirius can’t help but imagine Remus skating a hand over the waistband of his own trousers as he says it. Sirius groans into the receiver and knocks his head against the phone cradle. “You are going to be the end of me, lobo, do you know this?” The nickname Alice had tossed out Tres Escobas feels nice on Sirius’ tongue, and the intrigued hum from Remus’ end of the phone clarifies that even further.

_“I think I do. I’ll see you soon, Sirius.”_

“En una hora—adiós,” Sirius says quickly. He hangs up with a bit too much force before giving himself a moment to collect his breath. Remus Lupin just invited him over to his flat. Remus Lupin has a cold, but he sounds like he wants to do things one does _not_ tend to do when one has a cold. Remus Lupin is Remus Lupin is _Remus fucking Lupin._

Sirius Black is, simply and as ever, fucked.

But he doesn’t particularly dislike that nowadays.

After a moment of waffling over what he should do with the espressos, Sirius decides to take them along with him. Out from the phone booth he hoofs it to the metro, ducking artfully through turnstiles and onto a mostly-empty car with both cups held in either hand while he sits and watches the rhythm of the city go by. The periodic _chuk-chak_ of the train along its tracks is almost meditative. Sirius is grateful for the peaceful break in his sprinting subconscious, even just for a handful of minutes, as he’s taken north to a neighborhood he only knows for its theatres and galleries. _But the finest art,_ his unhelpful stream of romance drips into his slowed thoughts, _has a head cold and is waiting for you to knock on his door,_

Poetry, Sirius decides immediately, is horrible. Stupid, unecessary, lovely, perfect, and horrible.

Tugging Remus’ address from his back pocket is a challenge with two hands full of coffee—surely gone cold by now, but Sirius sticks to his choices, damn it—and one that he only just barely conquers. Scanning house numbers, surrounded by students and small families and the odd bustling professor, Sirius finds a quaint little walkup with traditional roof tiles tucked away in a corner with Remus’ _103_ bolted to its outside. Sirius’ heart leaps into his throat. This is it, this is Remus’ home; he glances up at the top-most window, wondering if unit B is the taller or lower one on this building, before swallowing his nerves and mounting the steps to shoulder into the front courtyard.

It turns out that both flats in the building are the tall, skinny type, and unit B is just to Sirius’ left when he turns in a small circle after the main door shuts behind him. He steels his breath before shifting one of the cups into the crook of his arm and knocks twice.

It’s but a moment before he hears footsteps approaching behind the door, but Sirius feels it stretch out before him like a lifetime. The bolt clicks backward and the door swings open before Sirius is ready to face the reality of the last several months culminating in front of him.

Remus is slightly flushed and just as slightly smiling. He’s in jogging trousers and a loose t-shirt, glasses on and hair a-fly, looking every bit the part of bedrest that he should with a cold. Sirius’ jaw is clenched. He holds the espressos out like one would hold a steering wheel, and Remus laughs like the sun might break through his mirth-shut eyes.

“I brought the coffee Daniel made,” Sirius blurts over Remus’ laughter. Remus leans unhelpfully against the wall, still laughing and shakes his head.

“I told him to make those _both_ for you! You always complain that you need two!” Remus says around his leaping breath. Sirius feels himself go red, but before he can argue Remus steps to the side and gestures to his stairs with an open hand. He’s smiling at Sirius with a promising look, something on the edge of pride, and Sirius finds that he might follow that off the edges of the world itself.

“Come upstairs, hermoso.” Remus’ murmur is more evidently fogged with a cold in person, but it’s terrible endearing. Sirius obliges without another word, agreeing with robotic impulse to go up first, not trusting himself to keep from tripping if the swaying image of Remus’ backside was to mount the steps ahead of him. “I’m on the first landing, to the left,” Remus says from just a few steps behind Sirius. _Ave, ave, ave,_ he still sounds so perfect even with this malady clouding his throat. Sirius wants to devour him, completely, regardless of the consequences.

Sirius stops outside the door when he reaches it and earns a cheeky little smirk from Sirius at that. “What!” He says, gesturing shortly with the cups that have now gone less than lukewarm. “I’m holding things!”

“Set them down inside,” Remus says simply, still rife with humor, and Sirius can only snort back at him lest his explode with a whole litany of poetry he does _not_ want to unload right now.

Remus’ flat is spartan, if not chic. Several posters for performances or concerts line the walls, with midcentury design sitting comfortably in all the furniture and the layout of the space. A record player is spinning in the corner by a large armchair, and Sirius has to laugh with a freeing burst when he focuses in on the music it spins: “ _¡Ya está despuntando er día!/¡Cantad, campanas, cantad!/¡que vuerve la gloria mía!”_

“What, I can’t drown in more Lorca when I’m not in a classroom?” Remus shoots an impish look at him, and Sirius shakes his head while he set the coffee on a corner of Remus’ kitchen counter not taken up by books. The music builds and builds into the climax of De Falla’s finale, a ridiculous foil to this moment of arrival in Remus’ home, while Sirius leans back against the refrigerator and fixes Remus with as calm a smile as he can muster.

“No, it’s only that my neighbor was listening to this same record this morning. I heard it right through my walls.”

Remus laughs as well. “What a day for coincidences, isn’t it?”

“A day indeed,” Sirius hums without entirely meaning to. Remus looks as though he has something witty prepared quickly in response, but he bursts suddenly with a cough—a phlegmy sound that sees him squint in apology.

“Sorry. I might not be very good company with this cold.”

The record skips into the hiss of silence as Sirius quickly weighs his options. They could reschedule, yes; Sirius has now seen Remus’ flat, and with that barrier broken any future meeting will surely go that much smoother for the both of them. It isn’t as though there’s any question to what the two men _want;_ Sirius can tell from the depths of his bones that they’ve arrived at this sensation of belonging much at once, as though they are dos peregrinitos reaching the front doors of their destination in the same step. Somehow, inextricably, they belong to one another.

But all that remains is when that link is forged. And Sirius is impatient, and indeed it has been a day for coincidences. He isn’t one to ignore luck when she shows her pretty face around more than one corner so often.

“Come here,” Sirius murmurs.

Remus looks up at him with a wideness to his pupils that can’t be manufactured, a look that can only come from eager devotion and the swirling mysticism of bone-deep attraction that can never know any definition in this plane of simple existence. He takes but two steps before his hands are on Sirius’ hips, and he touches their foreheads together in gentle preamble before Sirius has a chance to seize the moment.

“If you catch my cold, you can’t blame me,” he whispers. “Prométemelo.”

“I could never blame you for anything, not even if you fucking _tripped_ me last night.” Sirius breathes the ridiculous truth in half a voice; it is ridiculous, truly, but it’s honesty in totality, and he can only shut his eyes and breathe in low and deep as Remus closes the gap between them.

Remus tastes less of fresh cigarettes than he did last night, but the underlying spice of his sweetness is still there like the outline of a dream. Sirius groans softly into the kiss and opens his lips to Remus’ tongue, delving warm and gentle to press at his own. The need for words departs in an instant. Sirius slides his hands down to Remus’ hips and presses them in, ever so slightly, giving Remus the pressure and hint at insistence that he had been too wrapped up in newness to show last night. Remus acquiesces immediately with wordless approval, pulling them both backwards, over the comfortable-looking stretch of a sofa that Sirius sees through heavy-lidded eyes when he barely opens them to see where they’re going before shutting them again. Bliss is _intoxicating._ Remus serves it in absolute spades.

Before Sirius can track time properly, Remus is horizontal and Sirius is pressed down over him. Remus’ glasses are gone to one edge of the coffee table, his arms are stretched lazily above him with Sirius’ hand pinning both wrists softly down into the couch cushions, and Remus is sighing into Sirius’ mouth with such blind encouragement that Sirius could die happily right here in this flat.

“I want every piece of you,” Sirius breathes, his words not quite his own, spun from some long-untouched depth of his that makes home of all his heavier feelings. His heart is a leaden weight in his chest, not unpleasant but not quite comfortable, only softening by margins when he looks down to see Remus smiling up at him with a deep flush painting across those cheeks of his.

“Take whatever you need, hermoso. I always want to dance with you, no matter the angle.”

Sirius drops his forehead into the curve of Remus’ shoulder and breaks with snickering laughter without entirely meaning to. “That was very sweet but also _very_ flowery-poetic of you,” he says through the bounce of his diaphragm. Remus’ body shakes with his own staccato glee alongside, and Sirius feels him shake his head.

“I _know,_ I’m trying to be saucy! It’s hard when I’m stopped up, and I don’t feel very enticing in sweatpants and a jumper.”

Sirius pulls back to rake his eyes over Remus once more, taking his time to drink in the perfection of Remus’ body no matter his head cold, and fixes the man beneath him with a look that he hopes is as sultry as it feels. “You are always enticing, in ways that aren’t entirely fair. I’ll dance with you until my feet fall off.”

“Promise me,” Remus repeats in a whisper. The honesty swimming in those eyes of his is staggering, and Sirius can’t keep from kissing him again before drawing back to nod.

“Always,” he murmurs, “al final de la tierra y de vuelta.”

There is, after that, no more need for words.

They lose their clothes in a slow shed, the steady loss of barriers, to see both of them bared and blushed for the feast of one another in this haven of togetherness. It’s better than sharing the stage, Sirius thinks as he delves against Remus’ skin. It’s similar in the way that they’re breathing together, moving together, sweating together, but the arcs of their bodies have different destinations here and Sirius couldn’t keep compás in this hallowed moment with a fucking gun to his head. The seconds and minutes bleed into one another to make up a reality that is nothing but Remus’ skin, Remus’ limbs, the way Remus is panting beneath Sirius’ touch and the press of their sex to drag them both closer and closer to a finale that will forever be more blessed than the applause from some nameless audience. _They_ are the only audience that matters here, the pair of them the masters of this dance and this dance alone, and Sirius will gladly practice it until he drops.

After this, there is plenty of time for the slow steps of practice inherent in building the pathway necessary for two lives to properly intertwine.

But for now, in the pocket of this quiet afternoon in Madrid on which nothing monumental needs to occur besides the final arrival of two men who have needed one another far more than they could have ever known before meeting, Sirius will live in the moment. He will touch and be touched and approach ecstasy like an old friend quick on the heels of Remus’ own completion. After then they will lie together, slow and lazy on the floor, before compulsion and giddiness spur them into more of the same.

Had he been able to predict it several months prior, Sirius would have written it off as wishful thinking.

As it stands in the present, Remus Lupin is all he may have ever needed in a life full of waiting and hoping and endless practice for a performance that felt as though it might never arrive.

It feels now as though they have always known one another; that this is simply a pickup of something that has been going on for much longer than two stumbling bailaores could have ever dreamed up.

It is brilliant. It is eternal.

It is, in a single fucking perfect, ridiculous word, _duende._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¡Y ahí está el fin!
> 
> Thank you, endlessly, to everyone who has shared their feelings and their thoughts on this story so far. I loved being able to weave this story for you, something so dear to my heart and my soul, and I hope you will continue to let me know if this has resonated with you on any level at all <3
> 
> For life, for love, for the stage!! Always and onward <3


End file.
